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Number of blogs - March 2007

If you haven’t taken a speed-reading course, maybe it’s time to consider it, because keeping up with the blogosphere is getting tougher all the time.

The latest report from Technorati chief executive Dave Sifry shows the number of blogs increasing by about 120,000 per day, although that’s a slightly lower rate of growth than six months ago. 

Here are highlights of Sifry’s State of the Live Web report (formerly the quarterly State of the Blogosphere): 

  • There are 70 million blogs in existence
  • About 120,000 new blogs each day, or…
  • 1.4 new blogs every second
  • 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
  • Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
  • 1.5 million posts per day, or…
  • 17 posts per second
  • Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
  • 22 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 – up from 12 in the previous quarter
  • Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
  • English second at 33%
  • Chinese third at 8%
  • Italian fourth at 3%
  • Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 blogging languages at 1%
  • English the most even in postings around-the-clock
  • Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
  • 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
  • 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February
  • Here’s Sifry’s chart of blogging languages, but I’m sceptical of the claim that Japanese is more widely used than English. After all, the population of Japan is about 130 million, while the total population of the predominantly English-speaking UK, USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand (and yes, there are other Engish speaking populations elsewhere) is more than three times higher at about 414 million. If the Japanese really are such prolific bloggers, I’d like to know what impact that has on the rest of their lives! Or do they tend to write shorter posts than English bloggers?

    Blogging languages 

    Tagging is getting more popular too, and Technorati says it is tracking some 230 million blog postings that include tags.

    The explosive growth that we see in the Technorati index is mirrored in social media sites throughout the Web, including Flickr, YouTube, and the like. This shared phenomenon allows us to marry the wealth of information in our index with the wealth of that stored on social media sites across the Live Web through the shared construct of tags.

    For the uninitiated, a tag is a category or descriptor that someone (often the creator) assigns to it . This descriptor literally hangs off the media that’s published to the web much in the same way a luggage tag hangs off your suitcase — easily identifying the bag.

    The bottom line: we’re seeing explosive growth in the tags index. People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages. Tags adoption has become a phenomenon across the Live Web, and we are seeing a correlative explosive growth at Technorati.

    Hence Technorati’s decision to rename the report “State of the Live Web” to encompass not just blogs.

    And, while we’re talking about Technorati, Sifry says he’s interested in stepping down from the top job at the company he founded four years ago in order to be more active in product development. The search is underway for a new CEO.

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    1. […] more than 70% of the content being user generated. The numbers prove IDC’s forecast, in 2007 Technorati published a blog citing the growth of blogs. Some of the highlights […]

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