Blog Math

Technorati released its latest "State of the Blogosphere" report this morning. What strikes me about the report is how much blogging is not happening. Look at these numbers:

• Technorati is tracking about 57 million blogs right now.
• Half (55 percent) are considered active, but "active" means they have been updated one time within the past three months. That does not seem active to me.
• That figure means that 25.6 million blogs are outdated and not being used. (I think that is a conservative estimate.)
• Technorati tracks 1.3 million blog posts per day. That seems to indicate that only a small fraction of the 57 million blogs update even once per week (at best it would be 9 million blogs).
  
• Of late, the number of blogs tracked doubles every 236 days.
• At least 100,000 blogs are created each day, more than one per second. Using the numbers above, that means that roughly 45,000 blogs are being created every day that will ultimately be abandoned and just sit dormant out there on the Web.

I want to examine this in a subsequent post in more detail, but this report supports a notion I've held for a long time: The Web is only an effective communication tool when you commit to consistently using it to communicate. If you don't, you're just filling (and wasting) space.

Thanks to Micro Persuasion for alerting me to this report's release. (This is a solid communications blog, if you are in the need for one.)