I've been interviewed for articles in newspapers quite a lot lately and what goes around comes around it seems. Today, for instance, I'm quoted in a larger article in Berlingske Tidende about the potential demise of the boom of blogs: Bloggerkulturen når snart mætningspunktet. - The article then made TV2 Radio call me, so I might be doing an "on air" interview with them later today, around 17.35. So I thought, I'd better check up on numbers.

The article quotes predictions by the research company Gartner which claims that the number of blogs are about to drop soon - they estimate that the world now holds more than 200 mill ex-bloggers. It doesnt link to the source though. Apparently the numbers are hidden somewhere within the site of Gartner's - they are included in the annual prediction of IT trends of the coming year and it looks like you have to be be a paying customer to get access to the real thing, but they did post a summary of 2007 predictions. Eweek has a nice run-through of the predictions (though personally biassed).

Informationweek had an article in December 2006 about the Gartner predictions, making interesting comparisons with Technorati. BBC also published a story online then, but didnt provide a direct link to the numbers either.

A related interesting finding, of april this year (?), by another commercial research institute is that apparently rich people (in the US) blog more - but only 9% of the general American population maintain a blog of their own (based on survey of 1000 users). This report is available online.

If you want to get an idea of the number of Danes that blog, overskrift.dk is the best place to find information. The site, according to their own statistics, currently tracks more than 40.000 Danish blogs - this is equivalent to roughly 0.8% af the Danish population being bloggers.

Technorati's State of the Blogosphere is as always openly available on their blog. In their October 2006 overview, they estimated that 55% of the blogs (they track?) are active. About 100.000 new blogs were still being created every day. They have recently (april 5th 07) published a new report on the blog - according to that, 120.000 new blogs are now being created every day but the growth rate is slowing down (slow growth is partly? mainly? due to a better way of filtering out splogs - spamblogs), however the number of blogs are still on the rise (Technorate now tracks more than 70 mill). Also posting numbers are not growing explosively, but still 17 new posts are published every second. For those interested, all of the Technorate reports on the state of the blogosphere are available on Sifry's site , he's the guy that writes the reports.

Labels: blogstatistics blogresearch

# posted by Lisbeth at: 10:49