Two weeks ago, I gave a class on blogging. No, don’t worry, you didn’t miss the announcement and the chance to rub elbows with my fabulousness, it was a class for my sister’s church, as only a handful of people had expressed interest. She and I weren’t sure anyone would come at all. However, nearly twice as many people as we expected showed up. Of those, only one didn’t have a blog.
This year’s State of the Blogosphere report from Technorati says that blogs have “arrived”—”blogs are a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream.” Last issued in April 2007, the S/B is an annual yardstick of the trends in the world of blogging at large.
This year, however, Technorati is aiming to make the S/B something more: “insight into the blogging mind.” Today begins a weeklong series of profiles on bloggers, beginning withdemographic profiles and continuing through the mechanics of blogging as well as making money in the blogosphere.
Of course, they still give their traditional measure of the size of the blogosphere:
Wow. The aggregate blogosphere has nearly doubled since the last report.
In the 2007 report, then-CEO Dave Sifry noted that between Q2 2002 and Q2 2006, the blogosphere doubled in size every 5 to 7 months (roughly 150 to 210 days, or about 28,000 blogs/day). Between Q2 2006 and Q2 2007, however, the blogosphere took 320 days to double (about 109,000 blogs/day). At this point, almost 18 months (roughly 540 days) after the last report, the blogosphere is still shy of doubling (adding about 117,000 blogs/day).
However, the second stat in Technorati’s graphic is sobering: of those 133 million blogs, only 5.6% (7.4 million) have posted in the last four months. Even fewer are what we’d probably consider “active”—1.1% had posted within the last week.
In April 2007, Sifry commented on the rate of posting:
the overall trend is that posting volume is growing more slowly, at about 1.5 million postings per day. That’s about 17 posts per second. In October 2006, Technorati was tracking about 1.3 million postings per day, about 15 posts per second.
Now, however, the trend has turned, with an average of 900,000 posts per day, or about 10.4 posts per second. That’s a pretty big drop. In all, less than 3% of the world’s population has started a blog (even without multiple blogs from the same person). 0.12% of the world’s population has posted on a blog in the last four months.
It’s a good thing we have Technorati to let us know we’ve arrived.
How have you seen the blogosphere change of the last year and a half? Do you think we’re slowing down, or are we making up for quantity with better quality?
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