Dave Sifry of Technorati has updated his “State of the Blogosphere” presentation from Web 2.0 last October. The growth in blogging is really amazing. From his note announcing his new findings:
“Technorati is now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links. That’s just about double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004. In fact, the blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months. It has already done so at this pace four times, which means that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size by over 16 times.”
Dave will be adding more to his presentation, so keep an eye on his site.
While the numbers are impressive, they fail to tell the other half of the story. According to a recent report by Perseus, as referenced by EPS, 70% of all blogs are updated less than once every two months and 25% are built but never used. Less than 3% update weekly and only 1% update daily.
The Perseus study is almost completely unreliable. Read through the statistical methods they use – they used a sampling method that is somewhat creative. Note how they guessed the average age of people in the blogosphere, for example.
We’re seeing about 45% of weblogs are “stagnant”, meaning that they haven’t been updated in 6 months or more, and that’s not using statistical sampling methods, that’s from watching the entire blogosphere.
Dave
Those studies that “estimate” the numbers of blogs or indeed websites scare the hell out of me. The Perseus study sounds very like one of them. Part of the work that I do is monitoring the number of domains and websites that are Irish owned and operated. This involves checking that the sites exist rather than merely estimating that they are there. It is kind of hard to run a search engine based on results from hypothetical websites.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at building an Irish blog search engine and there is one very important fact that has become apparent: Blogs are updated aperiodically whereas websites are updated periodically.
With a website, it is easy,(with a few years’ worth of data), to see that some sites update on a monthly or weekly basis and others have a yearly update frequency. Blogs, by comparison, are a very bursty form of communications. They need a trigger event (something about which the blogger feels strongly enough to write about it) to see updates. When particular blogs update, a cascade effect occurs on many other blogs. The link growth pattern is totally different to that between ordinary websites. It is dynamic.
With an aperiodic system, six months between updates means as much as six hours.The old periodic model of website updates that these studies use does not work with blogs. The simple reason: blogs have a human factor whereas websites generally have a business factor.