The Blogosphere’s Alive, And Turning Japanese

For the past few years, Sifry has regularly addressed the "State of the Blogosphere." After an absence of such reports since October 2006, Sifry emerges from the Technorati mines with a chunkier version he’s calling the "State of the Live Web," detailing especially the explosion of tagging.

"The bottom line: we’re seeing explosive growth in the tags index," said Sifry. "People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages."

Sifry’s full report can be found at his "Sifry Alerts" blog, complete with charts and graphs to satisfy your need for statistical profundity. Technorati is tracking about 230 million tagged posts, which means over a third of posts indexed by the blog search engine use categorical indicators. 

According to the report, Technorati is now tracking 70 million blogs, growing by 120,000 new blogs daily (worldwide), or nearly one and half per second. This is slower than it has been in past years, when the total blogosphere was doubling nearly twice as fast.

Slower doubling is just a normal growing pain, though, as numbers increase; after all it would take longer to make two elephants than two mice, if you’ll forgive the asinine analogy.

But don’t give any credit for growth to splogs (spam blogs), which have also been thriving in recent months, growing like a termite swarm at 3,000 to 7000 new splogs daily. December, when peace and goodwill are transfused with greed and ego-gasmic self-entitlement, splog counts rise to about 11,000 daily.

Sifry says Technorati removed 341,000 splogs from its index in December alone.

One of the more interesting parts of the report is the increased acceptance of blogs as media sources. Just six months previous, only 12 blogs made it into the top 100 Internet sites list. As of April, the number of blogs on the list increased to 22.

"Blogs continue to become more and more viable news and information outlets," he said.

But don’t expect them to all be in English. While 36 percent of all blog post are Anglo-centric, that’s less than before when the International Language enjoyed 39 percent of the conversation. Japanese is now the most-used language of the blogosphere, accounting for 37 percent of all posts, up from 33 percent.

English and Japanese are followed by Chinese and Italian, with Farsi making it into the top ten for the first time.  

Don’t hold your breath on the State of the Blogosphere report, though. The Blogosphere’s all grown up now and has changed its name to the Live Web, a post-pubescent transmogrification that includes blogs, photos, videos, music, events, and tags. Sifry’s State of the Live Web report is due out later this week.

Sifry called the growth of tagged media pages "phenomenal."

"As the use of tags becomes more ubiquitous across all forms of social media and the publishing platforms that support them," he said, "they’ve become the lingua franca of the Live Web – the way in which people all over the world indicate what topics or issues are top of mind and guiding self-expression."

Business has been good for Technorati. In March, the site attracted over nine million unique visitors, a 141 percent increase over the previous quarter. Online metrics firm Hitwise recently reported that Technorati was again, after a brief slip to Google’s Blog Search, the most used blog search engine.

Google’s been a much tougher competitor in the blog search world lately, ever since the company integrated a Blog Search link with Google News.

Even that extra homepage exposure hasn’t been able out-promote the word-of-mouth cred Technorati’s been enjoying recently. Robert Scoble indicates that Technorati has been the talk of South Park – the one in San Francisco, that is.

The Scobeleizer is challenging his readers to pit the two engines against each other and share results. Early testing shows Technorati bringing back twice as many results as Google.

"It does look like Technorati has pulled ahead again in this race," he said. "The UI on Technorati is certainly ahead of Google’s."

Speaking of UI’s, Tantek Celik also brings our attention to three new Technorati widgets, which can be embedded on a blog or website, designed to give live information about the current top searches, top tags, and best authority (authority’s important for linking).