July 14, 2005
How Many Blogs? Fewer Than You Think.
Posted by Kevin | Print This Article
Wondering how many blogs there are is a lot like wondering how many websites there are (a lot, but it doesn’t really matter, and most of ‘em are junk). But Steve Rubel points to a post from David Sifry indicating that Technorati is calculating 900,000 posts a day, which, even allowing for spam posts, gives a better indication of how active the blogosphere is.
When you think about it, that’s not really that big. I’d be more interested in discovering overall blog circulation, which is infinitely harder to track (but again, with recent surveys indicating pretty low self-proclaimed usage of blogs, probably comparatively small — and the overwhelming majority of those 900,000 posts will never be read by anybody but the author).
But even if the number of postings is relatively tiny as far as a mass media goes, Sifry’s post itself shows that the voice of blogs is louder than any measurement might indicate — since the real point of the article is the rollout of some apologies and bug fixes for Technorati, which has been taking a beating for its buggy service, and basically declared dead, by bloggers like Jeremy Wright and Duncan Riley. Shrill voices sound louder (and are harder to ignore) in an echo chamber. (I don’t think Technorati’s dead, but they haven’t handled their recent service failures well — they need a little more transparency on their homepage itself when their servers are overloaded. For an alternative, Ice Rocket seems pretty cool.)
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