State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006

Technorati’s Dave Silfry does these updates on periodic basis. Here is the latest at State of the Blogosphere, October, 2006. Technorati is currently tracking more than 57 Million Blogs. I wonder how many have more than 10 posts and have recent posts. Their definition of active is that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months. By this measure, about 55% of all blogs are active but this seems a bit loose.

Are blogs peaking? The report states that, “as of October 2006, about 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there was a slight decrease quarter-over-quarter in the number of new blogs created each day.” I think with so many they have become mainstream. I see blogs everywhere for substantive purposes. It may be hard to sustain the explosive growth. Technorati also says it can filter out spam blogs better so this might be the reason for the “slower” growth. The posting volume of 1.3 million a day has also leveled off but this also might be from better spam filters.
Dave says that “the integration of blogs and traditional media sites on the web continues…as we move down the curve (of top visited sites), blogs become more widespread in the list. There are 12 blogs in the top 100 combined list…By the time you reach the top 5000, blogs have essentially taken over, with very few well-funded mainstream media sites listed. This is partially because of the nature of the medium - that is, the traffic of sites further down the curve make significant staffing and revenue difficult.”

It is the niche areas where blogs serve best so this is not surprising. In fact it is encouraging. Dave also reports that there are about 1.5 million blogs of the 57 million total with at least 3 links or more over the past six months. These form the core of the conversations. These blogs are grouped into different levels and compared. Those with less than 100 links average around 250 days old while those with over 100 are older and post more frequently. The “high authority” category 100-499 links averages a daily post while those with over 500 links average twice that amount. This blog is in the 100-499 category and I try to post at least once a day.

There is much more in the complete report, The State of the Blogosphere, October 2006.

Comments

[John Maloney]

Hi --

But what does it mean for KM? I have heard KM executives FLATLY rejecting blogs for any KM purpose or strategy. They said it openly, in a major KM Conference!

KM's adoption of social media has been on of the biggest disappointments of the 90s.

Instead of catching the waves of social tools and KM innovation and riding them to the beach, KM is getting literally drowned by the technology, methods and social mechanisms that would do them the most good.

-j

[bill Ives]

John - Thanks for the comment. I see that blogs and web 2.0 are the next wave of KM as I have written about many times on this blog. Intranet 2.0 see- http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2006/09/writable_intran.html for example. One quote from Indus Khaitan that is in this post is worth repeating here. “Writable Intranet” is the corporate intranet of the future where employees collaborate using Wikis, Blogs and applications interoperate using RSS. The Writable Intranet does not have series of static pages where information is disseminated "top down". It is the place where employees collaborate, exchange thoughts, create plans, capture meeting notes, track projects, create documents (not word documents but documents which are web pages and have version control). The Writable Intranet marks the end of e-mail as the collaboration platform. The Writable Intranet means that enterprise knowledge is "free" and searchable by anybody. The "freedom" implies that knowledge is neither in e-mails and nor in documents but in easily accessible and searchable repositories.” See also http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2006/06/preparing_for_i.html

[Saskboy]

That's interesting information. It makes me wonder if those stats are how Technorati stays good at keeping the "splogs" out of its system [as it claims to do]. I've seen some splogs indexed before, but didn't go back later to see if they were still around. I found out about splogs not long after my blog got an RSS feed, and a spammer promptly stole sections of my content for their fake blog site.

[bill Ives]

I wonder how many other blog have their content taken without their knowledge. I have agrred to have my blog syndicated by several soruces (Newstex, BlogBurst, Colabria,etc) but it is transparent to me. I do get some comment and trachback spam but Typepad is fiarly godd at filtering this out