The Blogosphere Goes International
David Sifry, from Technorati, posted in the beginning of this month the state of the blogosphere on Language and tagging. Some of the important highlights :
* Technorati now tracks over 35.3 37.3 Million blogs
* 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
There are some concepts that I didn't like in technorati especially assuming a post to a page, which are completely two different things and it's used to track popularity of blogs and posts over the blogosphere. But one of the important results published in the post are the languages used by bloggers, the blogosphere is going more and more international ! In march 2006 only 31% of posts are in english while 37% are in Japanese ! It's interesting to notice that Japanese and chineese bloggers post shortly but very frequently, this is also relative to moblogging and the number of bloggers in the countries.
What could this mean for bloggers?
Bloggers are also readers in the blogosphere, certainly english is very well understood but it's interesting to provide alternative to translate or ready content in different popular language such japanese and chineese. This will attract more readers, and certainly more revenue. You may understand for example why Engadget is available in english, chineese, Japanese and spanish ! Especially if you know that these communitites are very attracted by gadgets and high tech, so at least providing translation tools, and there are lot of free ones.
Tagging the world
Technorati is also interested into tagging, and it's certainly a very innovative concept to organize content in thousands of categories by people throught the blogosphere, everybody can participate and create tags. And this what makes tags an interesting concept which could be used to provide information such what's going on in the blogosphere now, what people are interested in ... etc.
47% of all blog posts are using tags is in my humble opinion a good percentage even if it doesn't represent a majority, but in this case we are talking about a new concept to be adopted and this is not about democracy. Also you should know that technorati tags are proprietary, It would be more interesting if companies adopt an open tagging format which will help providing more standardization and make adoption more larger.
Also another information that I would love to see which is to relate tags to countries, this will provide more accurate information for example you can see the more popular tags in the different countries, rather than seeing global tags which could be not related to your country. And so you can have more detailed reports such the google zeitgeist, but inspite of seing what people are searching for, you can see what people are talking about.
I'll try to talk more about these two concepts in the future, maybe there is even a project that will be build around these concepts which will be open source and certainly will be announced here.
