Blog P.I.

Earlier in the month Technorati founder/CEO David Sifry published the latest of his “State of the Blogosphere” reports. This one doesn’t break a lot of new ground — Farsi edges out Dutch as the 10th most-used language! — but it does look as if the Technorati team has taken previous criticisms into consideration. Numerous bloggers derided the August report as inaccurate (or worse) by counting dead blogs and spam blogs among the exponentially rising number of blogs in the known universe. In this installment

The State of the Blogosphere continues to be strong.

though the curve representing new blog creation finally begins to flatten:

Sifry says this “may be” the result of improved spam-fighting measures: “Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.”

He also buries the lede by skipping too quickly past this newsworthy finding:

About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months.

As usual the report is not lacking for beautiful charts (some of which I have appropriated for this post) but a chart showing the number of active blogs is not among them. Contrary to the bold-faced boast

Currently Tracking More than 57 Million Blogs and Counting.

there are not actually some 60 million active blogs out there. The number is closer to 33 million, which still sounds impressive even if it too is probably a little inflated, and most importantly, has the virtue of being a useful number.

In the (now mysteriously unavailable) comments on the post, one of the early respondents asked that a future report show what the top blogs are actually writing about, perhaps based on the search engine’s top 50 tags. Anyone can check out the most-used Technorati tags for themselves, but I thought it might be interesting to go down the list and figure out what genres or categories define the Top 100 and count them up.

As you can imagine, that’s quite a list. So here’s the color key for the chart and a sample:

Ready for the full list of 100? After the jump:

After the list, check below for more comments. So, what’s in the Technorati Top 100?

Thoughts:

• Blogs about technology and business make up half of the top 10 blogs and nearly a third of all blogs in the list. Is there anything interesting to say about that? It’s not just that the geeks got there first, but that they’re by definition interested in technology, and blogs are, to put it mildly, kind of a big development.
• Niche blogs are big. Considering they’re almost on par with the tightly linked political blogosphere, which also has a capable external support system in none other than the MSM, some niches must be bigger than we might have thought. This category is probably the one most would disagree with; they weren’t all easy calls. Ze Frank could be considered politics, technology or entertainment (maybe in a future edition, I’ll create tags instead of categories). But he’s also a video blogger, which is unique enough to be niche. I welcome all feedback.
• Sifry’s SOTB reports have consistently shown that about 60% of tracked blogs are written in not-English. But this 60% is vastly underrepresented in the list. One possibility is that more blogs have to compete for fewer readers in the non-English blogosphere. But considering that the relationship between links and traffic is nebulous, perhaps there simply fewer cross-links between those blogs. They are spread out over many different languages after all; 33% is Japanese, but the rest is, shall we say, Balkanized. Or, overall blog readership is the same but the readership curve is relatively flat across all blogs, and the not-English blogosphere is impervious to power laws.
• Considering how much money Americans spend per year on entertainment, blogs so themed (including gossip, sports and music) appear to be slightly underrepresented in the top 100. Does this mean that those bloggers are less influential compared to tech and political bloggers? Perhaps. It could be that entertainment journalism has satisfied reader demands better than in hard news and all the niches. Or maybe their readers don’t demand quite as much?
• MySpace is a lousy blogging platform, but it does host a couple of very successful blogs — and one of them is soft core porn. Imagine how much better represented here it would be if MySpace was more like Vox.
• Of course, these are just the top 100, the very tip of the long tail. More detailed patterns would surely emerge as one moved from 100-999 and beyond. Technorati and Dave Sifry could pull those numbers together, and I like his charts showing that blogs rival the MSM once you get to just 51-100 for inbound sources. Here’s hoping it’s in the next report.

As my high school political science teacher, Mr. Marchese, used to (and for all I know, still does) say: Questions, comments, reservations?