twopointouch

Some very big numbers in David Sifry’s new report about the statistics thrown up by the blog tracking service Technorati:

• Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
• The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
• From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.
• About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.
• About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati’s filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
• About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.
• Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
• This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
• The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.

Sifry notes that English has become the number one language of the Blogosphere with 39% of the posts. However, 31% of posts are in Japanese, and large parts of the French and Korean blog community are not tracked by Technorati.

Currently, just 12% of blogs are in Chinese. However, by the end of 2006, it is predicted that China will have more broadband lines than the US, which ought to redress the balance somewhat. Currently, no Indian languages feature among the top 20, but again, I would guess that rapidly growing access to computers in India over this year will soon change that.

I find it interesting that the blogging phenomenon does not appear to be culturally specific. It has clearly taken hold in countries like Korea and Japan to a greater extent than many Western countries, but few areas with reasonable technology penetration are missing. It seems that the technological drivers for blog use (access to IT, easy tools, broadband, free hosting) are far more important than any of the cultural drivers that have been suggested to me - dissatisfaction with mainstream media, desire for self-expression, etc. Unless, of course, those things are universal.

Update: smart post here on how the rise of blogging means that everyone will be doing it in 12 months.