Business and Blogging

More Japanese Language Posts than English: Latest State of the Blogosphere Report

by Des Walsh on April 9th, 2007

From time to time, in speaking with business groups about blogging, I ‘ve mentioned a conversation I’d had with a chief executive, about why blogging was in my view something any business owner should know about and possibly incorporate into their business activity. The punchline of the story was that when I explained that there were over five million blogs, the chief executive said “anything where there are five million people involved I want to know about.” My figure of five million was based on what Technorati was tracking at that time. That figure is looking quite modest now.

With Dave Sifry’s latest (April) State of the Blogosphere/State of the Live Web report just out and announcing that Technorati is now tracking over 70 million blogs, my assumption is that a lot more business owners and chief executives would do well to take more than a passing interest in what’s happening.

Up from 26.3 million at the beginning of 2006 and 57 million by November 2006, the increase to April 2007 is not at the former rate of doubling every five months, which prompts the comment:

This shouldn’t be surprising, as we’re dealing with the law of large numbers - it takes a lot more growth to double from 35 million blogs to 70 million (which took about 320 days) than when it doubled from 5 million to 10 million blogs (which took about 180 days).

The report comes with the usual array of graphs such as the above overview one. The graphs, with accompanying text, are worth studying, especially by anyone doing business internationally. Note for instance the graph of blog posts by language.

For anyone who might think that blogging is predominantly an activity of English speakers, it might come as a shock to see displayed graphically the fact that Japanese at 37% is now ahead of English at 33% in terms of the relative proportion by number of blog posts. Chinese is the third with a relatively more modest 8%.

I know it says it in the text, but for me anyway the graph had a bigger impact.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no available statistics, from Technorati or elsewhere, on the proportion of business blogs. Also, from the fairly recent Edelman study of the corporate blogosphere, it’s clear that business blogs are still predominantly a North American phenomenon, with much lower uptake of business blogging, in actual numbers or proportionately, in Japan or China.

The summary of the State of the Blogosphere/State of the Live Web report, in point form, is:

• 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

Another great contribution from Dave Sifry and Technorati to our understanding of what’s happening.

I realise only too well the challenges of defining what comes under the heading of “business blog”, but I’m hopeful that the Technorati machine can be trained to include some stats on this topic in future reports.

Note that the use of the graphics above and material from all the reports going back to 2004 , is explicitly permitted by the author under a Creative Commons, For-Attribution licence and provided the Technorati logo and links to the original report are included with any use of the charts or data.

Thanks to New Communications Review for the link.

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