Pop Goes The Blogging Bubble?
Technorati’s reading some interesting numbers on blogging and Business Week dissects them:
The numbers here show around 15.5 million active blogs, or blogs that have been updated in the past 90 days. Hurst pointed out, and I agree, that this is a more key number. That’s why I asked Sifry for this data. It’s a very different number from the overall 70 million total blogs that Technorati ever reports tracking.It also seems that the percentage of English blogs that are regularly updated has dropped as well. Does this mean that blogging has reached its peak? Has the bubble burst?As well, the percentage of blogs that are active compared to the total number of blogs tracked by Technorati is declining, according to the data that Sifry sent.
Blogs broke the 15 million barrier around September/October of 2006. What else happened in the fall of 2006?
The Congressional elections.
Potential millions of blogs were created to cover the 2006 campaigns and when November came and went, so did the blogs. Yet they’re still out there, inactive and charted by Technorati.
The following chart shows the raw number of blog posts over time:
Again, 2006 as a whole seems to be the peak of blogging activity over the last couple of years. Post November 2006 there’s a dip, a new peak around the New Year, and then it drops again.
I think it’s way too soon to say the blogging bubble has burst. Yes sites like MySpace and Facebook are impacting how people interact with one another on the web, but events like elections impact how people use the web as well. 2008 will probably see blogs being updated in record numbers once again.
