Duncan Riley> The perennial debate about how many blogs are in the Blogosphere has risen again following the recent Pew Blogging Survey and the SixApart takeover of LiveJournal. Pew internet estimated 8 million blogs in the United States, and SixApart claims 6.5 million blogs across LiveJournal, TypePad and Movable Type. Most pundits believe that the Google owned Blogger has at least 3 million users, although this figure cannot be confirmed by Google and hence is at best an educated guess. The Google and SixApart figures include users throughout the globe, and hence are not indicative of US blogs only. For the sake of argument, add approximately 5 million users in Western and English speaking countries utilising smaller blogs hosts and stand alone applications, including tools such as WordPress and Nucleus. This includes figures derived from LiveJournal clones, European articles on hosts such as 20six, and user numbers for pings from a number of other tools.
sub total 14.5 million.
Now let’s look at one non-English speaking market in particular, South Korea. According to a report in the Korea Herald, Cyworld, the countries biggest blog host, has 11 million users. As we are unable to confirm that the users may not be exclusively bloggers, as the only thing Google could translate could give me from the site is “The tumour got in nose end, The nerve is used repeatedly and it is touching” as the headline on the page (literally Lost in Translation), lets presume 7.5 million are bloggers, again an educated guess. The same Korea Herald reports “Planet Weblog Service” has 6 million users with blogs and Yahoo! Korea has 3 million users
sub total: 16.5million blogs
We know from Bill Gates interview with Gizmodo last week that MSN Spaces has 1 million blogs, which is a combination of figures from South Korea, Japan and English speaking markets. Add another 1 million bloggers across Arabic Speaking countries, another 1 million in Japan and the rest of Asia, and say 1/2 million for South America (who have a growing blog market).
Sub Total: 3.5 million
Total number of blogs in the world: greater than 34.5 million.
Is this conclusion scientific and what is the point of it all, you may ask? No, it is not scientific, and at best the later statistics are educated guesses. But personally, I’m tired of reading in the mainstream media (particularly the US Press, which leads how the rest of the world reports issues) that there are 500,000, 5 million or 8 million (The Pew Figure) blogs on the internet. Any simply analysis, which this is, of the Blogosphere says there a whole lot more, and the United States is NOT THE ENTIRITY OF THE INTERNET.
