Le Web 3 – Technorati's Dave Sifry and the state of the blogosphere
It is the afternoon session at Les Web in Paris, and now we are listening to presentations about blogs.
So give it up for Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, a big brash American, who seems pretty pleased with himself. It is perfectly understandable though given that everyone uses his wonderful blog search engine.
The good news is that he is giving is that the blog universe is continuing to grow. Since May 2002 the blogosphere doubled once every forty days. Dave says that there is a slight slow down now, but still lots of new blogs are being created.
So when will the rate slow down? Dave doesn’t know. ‘It has to slow down at some point, but it is still growing with 100,000 new blogs every day.’
Now we are moving on to posting volume which Dave sees as a more interesting/accurate indicator as to who is actually creating content. There are 1.3 million legitimate posts each – half of the are on Shiny blogs. Dave acknowledges that some of them are spam – but adds that ‘all healthy eco system have parasites.’
He also adds that 55 percent of all blogs out there have been updated at least once in the last six months. 11 per cent – 7 million blogs – update once a week or more.
Dave then talked about the global nature of blogosphere.
To illustrate this we have a slide that shows huge spike in terms of posts each time a major world event happens.
Another interesting snippet is that only 39 per cent of blogs are in English, 33 percent are in Japanese and 10 per cent in Chinese. And these are fairly recent developments.
Now he getting into blogs and its impact on the media. First up we have the relative ranking of websites. The top ones are the usual suspects, but there are also a few blogs creeping in namely Engadget and Boing Boing who are getting more links than even Reuters or CNET.
If there’s one key message it is that blogs are here to stay. The number of new blogs may be slowing down, but the people who are posting regularly is on the rise. We’ve been bitten by the bug and aren’t going to give it.
