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David Sifry, founder of Technorati, published his State of the Blogosphere this week. In his publication, he claims that on July 31, 2006, there are officially 50 million blogs. His numbers are highly optimistic and fails to acknowledge several things:
Sifry doesn’t distinguish between active, not-active, and splogs. In fact, in his universe, the blogosphere consists of all three entities. I drew this out as a Venn Diagram below:
Sifry’s universe is the cumulative count of all three entities. A more accurate approach would be to decompose the items in the Technorati Index and to intelligently discuss the components of each.
Conclusion
I hate splogs — and, in my opinion, the Splog venn above is probably larger than what I have approximated and the Active venn is most likely smaller than what I have approximated above. Sifry doesn’t seem to think Splogs are a problem as evident in his comments here. I argue that Sifry has an interest in over-stating the numbers. There is growth in blogging — yes, that’s good. But, his numbers are phony and I seriously question his objectivity.
At the end of the day, I think Pareto will win. Whatever number Sifry spits out, take ~20% (or less) of that and call those active. The rest is arguably garbage.
Others who Chimed in on this Topic
- Om does some analysis
- Dead 2.0 is funny about it
- Kevin Burton argues correctly about the topic
- Mathew Hurst of Blogpulse comments on it here and makes a proposal here.
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From Factiva’s perspecitive based on the numbers we’re getting from our blog vendor the number of bloggers who have posted in the past 1-3 months is about 2 million. So you’re right to think that your “active” circle should be smaller. Technorati’s numbers are always way high in my opinion. Also factor in
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