Blah Blah Blogosphere

By B.L. Ochman Technorati chief David Sifry has issued the quarterly state of the blogosphere report.

It's hard to take it seriously when Technorati doesn't actually deliver on its stated mission of tracking blog posts and traffic in real time. My blog links seem to be updated less than twice a week, and I know I'm not alone.

More to the point, D'log blog says,

"What the world really needs is not bloated sprawling uber-engines like Technorati, but small tightly-focussed niche blog-search engines aimed at professionals, pro-actively selected by humans (no submissions), spidering around 1,000 blogs at any one time, and with a simple “update your blog at least monthly or the bot kicks you off” attitude," says D'log.

And, D'log notes, that

a rigorous academic study, "Characterizing the Splogosphere" by Pranam Kolari, Akshay Java and Tim Finin of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, "was conducted in mid 2005. It found, after filtering out all the spam, rubbish and dead blogs, only around 500,000 real English-language blogs on the planet. Compare this to the Technorati estimate of around 14 million for the same period. That suggests a ratio of 28:1. By that measure, Technorati's "50 million" perobably means we have nudging 2 million "real" blogs in the English language."

At any rate, Sifry reports that: The blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago. But so what. How many of those are real blogs and not content suckers that steal content and publish it without links to the originators?

"About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, for example, but we're able to drop them before we even send out a spider to go and index the splog." He says only about 8% of spam blogs make it past their filters and then are removed quickly. But I don't find that to be the case in my Technorati stats at all.

Sifry also reports:

What is interesting is that some of the most influential weblogs are being treated in much the same way as traditional MSM, as measured by the number of bloggers who are linking to them.

English has retaken the lead as the #1 language of the blogosphere. However, he notes, there are some significant underreporting issues, especially in Korean and in French,, rendering that stat meaningless if you ask me.

The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time. English-speaking people are more likely to blog during work hours and early evening in the USA, while they are more reluctant to blog during work time in Japan.

Blah blah blog.....

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Posted by: Marianne Richmond at August 8, 2006 1:38 PM

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