The blogosphere has evolved into a living, breathing organism; the interrelated parts stemming from its bloggadocious heart have branched to include tags, vlogs, and podcasts. It even has its own virus – the splog. This evolution spurred Technorati’s Dave Sifry to redefine it as the “Live Web,” growing not as fast as it was, but growing nonetheless.
The Blogosphere’s Alive, And Turning Japanese
For the past few years, Sifry has regularly addressed the “State of the Blogosphere.” After an absence of such reports since October 2006, Sifry emerges from the Technorati mines with a chunkier version he’s calling the “State of the Live Web,” detailing especially the explosion of tagging.
“The bottom line: we’re seeing explosive growth in the tags index,” said Sifry. “People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages.”
Sifry’s full report can be found at his “Sifry Alerts” blog, complete with charts and graphs to satisfy your need for statistical profundity. Technorati is tracking about 230 million tagged posts, which means over a third of posts indexed by the blog search engine use categorical indicators.
According to the report, Technorati is now tracking 70 million blogs, growing by 120,000 new blogs daily (worldwide), or nearly one and half per second. This is slower than it has been in past years, when the total blogosphere was doubling nearly twice as fast.
Slower doubling is just a normal growing pain, though, as numbers increase; after all it would take longer to make two elephants than two mice, if you’ll forgive the asinine analogy.
But don’t give any credit for growth to splogs (spam blogs), which have also been thriving in recent months, growing like a termite swarm at 3,000 to 7000 new splogs daily. December, when peace and goodwill are transfused with greed and ego-gasmic self-entitlement, splog counts rise to about 11,000 daily.
Sifry says Technorati removed 341,000 splogs from its index in December alone.
One of the more interesting parts of the report is the increased acceptance of blogs as media sources. Just six months previous, only 12 blogs made it into the top 100 Internet sites list. As of April, the number of blogs on the list increased to 22.
“Blogs continue to become more and more viable news and information outlets,” he said.
But don’t expect them to all be in English. While 36 percent of all blog post are Anglo-centric, that’s less than before when the International Language enjoyed 39 percent of the conversation. Japanese is now the most-used language of the blogosphere, accounting for 37 percent of all posts, up from 33 percent.
English and Japanese are followed by Chinese and Italian, with Farsi making it into the top ten for the first time.
