When I first registered with Technorati (the de-facto standard service for tracking the so-called blogosphere), I had about 1 incoming link, and my ranking was about 1 millionth. David Sifry, Technorati’s CEO, gave his “state of the Blogosphere” report today, in which he claimed the site is now tracking roughly 57 million blogs, and revealed the following statistics:
- The blogosphere doubles roughly every 230 days
- As of October 2006, about 100,000 new weblogs were created each day
- The total posting volume of the blogosphere is showing about 1.3 million postings per day
My first reaction: holy freaking crap! Where are all these blogs? Does this count every new entry into Vox, MSN Spaces, MySpace pages, and all the other “quick havens” where people get their feet wet blogging? What are they writing about?
I also noticed another stat in the report: About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months. Which means, if I do my math, that my blog (with a Technorati ranking of ~22K at the time of writing) is in the top 1% of all tracked, active blogs.
Here’s where it gets crazy: my traffic and links don’t even come close to 1% of the Top 100 ranked blogs. Maybe I don’t post enough (thoughts on post frequency here and here)? More thoughts on Sifry’s post over at IP Democracy.
My second reaction: Really now, where are they? According to Sifry’s stats, about 40% of blogging is in English (more on language here), which means I should have the ability to discover about 40,000 new blogs every day. But I don’t see em anywhere. Sure, every now and then a new blog appears to gain some momentum and link traction, but at the end of the day, the discovery process for new blogs is pretty bad.
Maybe Technorati (or someone else) should introduce new services to get new blogs “on the radar?” It’d be nice if there was a way to gain some attention, other than hoping/praying that Robert Scoble reads (and links to) one of your posts. Sifry does make a variety of points on the notion of a blogger’s “authority” but, other than by writing some Top 10 list, it ain’t easy to get noticed these days.