Blogging by the Numbers

Here is an interesting article that measures the growth of the Blogosphere by three criteria: ‘Size’, ‘Activity’ and ‘Authorship’.

For example, according to the blog analysis firm Technorati, the size of the Blogosphere has doubled every five months over the last year and a half. David Sifry, the Technorati’s chief executive, says the current number of blogs is now over 8 times bigger than the 500,000 blogs it measured in June, 2003.Pew Internet & American Life also reports a new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds. That roughly translates into 15,000 new blogs every day. And blog-search company PubSub Concepts claims to already monitor over 6.5 million blogs.

Meanwhile, Perseus Development estimates by the end of 2004, there will be 10 million blogs, but the vast majority are already dead in the water. Weblogs Inc. founder Jason McCabe Calacanis has another perspective“there are millions of blogs, but I would say less than 1 million are updated regularly,” Calacanis e-mailed. “So less than 1 percent of the country is blogging, but that figure is going to grow over the next five years to some percentage of the folks who e-mail today.”

You can read the rest of the article at ClickZ.

Blog Bloke believes the dismal number of failed blogs is a reflection of the fact that many are little more than a ‘dear diary’. While there is nothing wrong with that, I know that I would get bored very quickly talking about myself day in and day out (perhaps it’s because I have no life beyond my blog).The Bloke therefore recommends finding a theme for your blog. Something you have a passion for that will give you a purpose for writing, topics to write about, as well as providing interesting content for your readers.