Dave Sifry’s ‘State of the Blogosphere’ posts are a quarterly occourance and generally cause a bit of a stir around the blogosphere for different reasons. Some use the stats to boast how far we’ve come – others to point out our weaknesses. Either way – this quarter’s one is out at State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006 – complete with the usual array of pretty graphs and interesting stats (well interesting to some).
There’s an interesting new section on blog authority and the posting behavior for bloggers that have different Technorati rankings.
The description of what they found about the blogs with very high authority (those in their top 4000) was interesting. I’ll break down their paragraph on these blogs into bullet points (with a little editing):
- This group exhibits a radical shift in post frequency as well as blog age
- Bloggers of this type have been at it longer – a year and a half on average
- The post nearly twice a day, an increase in posting volume of over 100% from the previous group with lower authority
- Many of the blogs in this category, in fact, are about as old as Technorati
- Some of these are full-fledge professional enterprises that post many, many times per day and behave increasingly like our friends in the mainstream media.
- As has been widely reported, the impact of these bloggers on our cultures and democracies is increasingly dramatic.
The following graph summarizes some of the differences between the four groups.
Obviously blog age, posting frequency and post count have a a significant impact. The blog age bit fits with my own little study on Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs which found that they have an average age of 33.8 months.
Here’s the summary of the other parts of Dave’s post:
- Technorati is now tracking more than 57 Million blogs.
- Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.
- Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size approximately every 230 days.
- About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.
- About 4% of new splogs get past Technorati’s filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
- There is a strong correlation between the aging and post frequency of blogs and their authority and Technorati ranking.
- The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.
- Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall, Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times.
