Share Your Blogging Experience: Technorati Survey

Bloggers, whether full time or part time, experienced or starters, are being invited to participate in Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere Survey 2010.

Surveying bloggers directly for the Technorati surveys was first done for the State of the Blogosphere 2008 report. Although I was invited to participate in the 2009 survey, I am pretty sure this year is the first time I have responded. The survey intro suggests a commitment of 15-20 minutes, which could be right on average, although I thought it took me a tad longer.

Here is the link for the survey.

In various presentations over the years I have found these State of the Blogosphere reports valuable in preparing presentations and workshops, so I’m personally pleased to know that Technorati is continuing to arrange the surveys.

They also form a valuable historical record of the evolution and world-wide growth of blogging.

For the sake of anyone wanting to go back over previous reports, it is worth noting that there are two distinct phases in the production of the reports from 2004 till now, with the dividing point being about mid 2007.

This post runs through the first stage up to mid 2007: tomorrow we’ll look at the second stage.

Technorati Surveys: the Era of Dave Sifry’s Authorship of the Reports

State of the Blogosphere 2004 - growth of the blogosphereThe first of the State of the Blogosphere studies was provided just under six years ago, on October 10, 2004 by Technorati Founder and first CEO Dave Sifry and appeared on his Sifry’s Alerts blog. Technorati was by that time tracking some 4 million blogs and the blogosphere had been doubling in size at least every 5 months.

By the time of Sifry’s next report, in March 2005, the blogosphere had doubled again and from 12,000 new blogs being created per day at the time of the previous report, there were now 30,000-40,000 per day, with no sign of the pace of growth letting up.

There was a further report in August 2005.

In the October 2005 report, a year after the first report, the size of the blogosphere was still doubling around every 5 months and Technorati was tracking 19.6 million blogs.

Further reports from Sifry followed in Feb 2006, Apr 2006 and Aug 2006.

By August 2006 he reported that the blogosphere, with over 50 million blogs, had grown by 100 times in 3 years, still doubling every 5-7 months.

Then in his October 2006 report (actually published on Nov 6, but headed October 2006) Sifry reported a total count of 57 million blogs tracked by Technorati, with 100,000 blogs being created every day.

Interestingly for people who may, like me, be interested in the role blogging can play politically worldwide, and with the benefit of hindsight about the unfolding of events in Iran over the following few years, Farsi had become a notable blogging language.

As we reported last quarter, English and Japanese remain the two most popular languages in the blogosphere. There were, however, some interesting shifts among those languages less well represented in the blogosphere. Holding steady in the number three spot is Chinese, although it has dipped slightly to 10% of the total posting volume. A notable change, however, is that Farsi has pushed its way into the top 10 languages in use in the blogosphere, bumping Dutch, which had held the number 10 spot over the last couple of quarters, into the number 11 spot.

(By July 2007, all Iranian bloggers would be required to register their blogs with a virtual government office.)

Sifry’s October 2006 report touched also on data about blogger behavior and identified some correlations between the age of blogs, frequency of posting and their relative status in terms of the Technorati authority ranking. Unless I’m missing something, the results were as you might guess: in my paraphrase, the longer you had been around and the more frequently you had posted the higher your ranking was likely to be.

Blogging Characteristics by Technorati Authority

The 2007 State of the Live Web Report

In April 2007, Sifry produced a somewhat different report, titled “State of the Live Web”, looking at a broader range of social media, now with over 70 million blogs and 120,000 new blogs a day (100 times the number from that first report back in 2004).

What made it possible to take a broader, social media scanning, look was “the rise in the use of tags across all forms of social media and the increasing implementation of tags by the publishing platforms supporting each form of media”.

As well as the State of the Blogosphere, data and interpretation would now be provided on the “State of Tags”.

And the bottom line was “explosive growth in the tags index”.

People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages. Tags adoption has become a phenomenon across the Live Web, and we are seeing a correlative explosive growth at Technorati.

That 2007 report was to be the last report in the series to be produced by Dave Sifry.  He has helpfully supplied a complete, linked list of his reports from 2004 to 2007.

In my post on this topic tomorrow we will look at the surveys from 2008 to now (Update: for the second post in this two part series, see Share Your Blogging Experience: Technorati Survey Continued .)

In the meantime, here is that link again to participate in the 2010 survey.

Des Walsh

Business coach and digital entrepreneur. With coach training from Coachville.com and its Graduate School of Coaching, and a founding member of the International Association of Coaching, Des has been coaching business owners and entrepreneurs for the past 20 years. Over the same period he has also been actively engaged in promoting the business opportunities of the digital economy. He is a certified Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) coach, and a certified specialist in social media strategy and affiliate marketing.

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