How many?
: For the record, the Paper of Record messed up Technorati’s statistics on the number of blogs in its story yesterday. They said:
The number of bloggers has grown quickly, thanks to sites like blogger.com, which makes it easy to set up a blog. Technorati, a blog-tracking service, has counted some 2.5 million blogs.
Of course, most of those millions are abandoned or, at best, maintained infrequently. For many bloggers, the novelty soon wears off and their persistence fades.
Wrong. Those are blogs that are regularly updated. A proportion of new blogs are abandoned, as I explained to the reporter in email (emphasis added):
A good source is Technorati, which tracks blogs for links. At www.Technorati.com you’ll see that they are now tracking more than 2.4 million blogs. At the Personal Democracy Forum at the new school today, Micah Sifry quoted his brother, David Sifry, founder of Technorati, with the latest stats: They track 12,000 new blogs a day (up from 3k last March); a third of those new blogs will go stagnant (no new post in three months); the other two thirds add up. The number is growing fast.Pew also did a study. Note, though, that its study came from figures gathered last year and the number grew considerably since. See these posts:
https://buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_03_02.html#006406
https://buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_03_03.html#006414
https://buzzmachine.com/archives/2004_03_01.html#006398
You are way, way safe saying there are more than 2.5 million. There are actually many more than that but they are tracked with ongoing content. If you need anything more at all, don’t hestitate to ask.
The Times made it sound as if it’s 2.5 million and dropping. They also found the lowest numbers they could find (Pew has bigger numbers than Jupiter, which they quote, but Pew didn’t fit in with their agenda.)
Smells like this deserves an Official Times Correction.
When I first got called on the story — by the intern not the reporter — they were on the track of the bloggers-are-nuts-in-bathrobes and I lectured him, saying that’s wrong and insulting and blind to the real story. They did at least include a quote of mine defending bloggers against the instastereotype. But They were setting out to make fun of and belittle the medium.
Scoff at your own risk, Times.
(They also got the description of my day-job company wrong. And I wouldn’t have minded a link, guys.)
: UPDATE: Considering the apoplexy of some in the comments, I am getting some clarification on the stats and will pass on what I find. If I’m wrong, of course, I’ll say so.
: UPDATE AND CORRECTION: I was wrong about an important aspect of this: I had understood from Dave Sifry when he spoke to ETech that Technorati dropped blogs from its count when they did not update in three months. I’m now told (and a commenter confirms) that this is not the case; Technorati still tracks the total. So I was wrong about that.
The actual count of current links from blogs is a different matter; it counts links from the home page of a blog, I’m told, and that is why the number of links to an individual blog can go down and up.
The commenter still says that The Times story is wrong but I leave that to them to discuss. My understanding that the count at Technorati was cleaned was not correct and so I’ll be the one to make the correction here.
