Blogs Move Into The Fast Lane

Blogs, once the domain of the digerati, have now moved into the mainstream according to an iMedia story. Visitations to blogs have increased 56 percent in the last year with 34 percent of the total Internet audience now listed as blog readers. Blog readers tend to skew younger, ages 18 - 44, and are also from more affluent households, but interestingly, there is good blog readership across most demographic groups.

Technorati, a popular blog search engine, is currently tracking 48.1 million blogs. Here are some other illustrative statistics from Part 1 and Part 2 of David Sifry’s April 2006 State of The Blogsphere posts:

• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
• Blogs are an international phenomenon. English in no longer the main language of the blogsphere worldwide. Here is the breakdown from March 2006 Technorati stats on the language used for blog posts:

- Japanese...37 percent
- English...31 percent
- Chinese...15 percent
- The next closest is “other” at 4 percent

• Nearly half of all blog posts have an author-generated category or tags associated with the post