Jack's already pointed to the latest numbers coming from blog search engine Technorati, which suggest that there are now 50 million blogs out there (read Dave Sifry's State of the Blogosphere for more). That, they say, indicates that one is being created every two seconds.
Kevin Burton, the founder of pseudo-Technorati competitor Tailrank, has taken issue with Sifry's figures on his own blog:
These numbers are overly optimistic and dangerous. There are not 50 million blogs. Blogs are great and all but too much hype is a bad thing. There might have been 50 million blogs that have ever been created but there aren't 50 million blogs in active use.
I think Kevin - who seems to have fairly restrictive concepts of what an "active" blog might be - also misses some other points. Does Technorati cover every blog in the world? I don't think so - it's clearly missing large chunks of the blogosphere, including big areas of the Asian market (it's been reported that 37% of blogs are written in Japanese and 15% in Chinese, for example).
So how do you measure how many blogs there really are? Strip out spam blogs - of which there are very many - and discount blogs which never get more than one or two entries (ditto) and then what? Do you include dead or static blogs? There are arguments for and arguments against that concept. But still, a global internet population of around a billion people online and 50 million blogs means that one in 20 surfers has a blog, on average. Given recent studies into such behaviour, a figure of around 5% does not sound ludicrous. So perhaps 50 million isn't so far off the mark, even if it isn't the same 50 million as Technorati is tracking.
