Sifry: The State of the Blogosphere

Just found an excellent resource information on the state of the blogosphere. Sifry's State of the Live Web has data from October 2004 through April 2007. Lots of visuals for are provided and are freely available for use under a Creative Commons license. Users are asked to keep Technorati logos and links when charts and data are shared. Sifry's most up-to-date portrayal on growth of weblogs is as follows:

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs 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 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior 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 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

I started this blog because I wondered, Where were the women bloggers?", but now as I learn more about social networking and blogging I wonder, where was I when people started blogging? While my adult children were telling me about MySpace and Facebook I was dismissing what they told me because when I did look at these social networking sites I saw much of it as juvenile, bawdy, and in poor taste. The sites did not hold my interest. What I did not know until I began to research women bloggers and blogging sites in general was just how informative and learning focused well-done blogs could be. While there is the not-so-good and seamy content, there is a wealth of well-done, well written, and education friendly writing going on about the topics I am interested in.

Who knew? Well it appears that since 2004 through 2006, a whole lot of people blogging knew.