ME and Ophelia

STATE OF THE BLOGOSPHERE
Technorati chief David Sifry charts our world

David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, posted some neat charts and graphs showing the data they have been tracking since November 2002, when Technorati's service started.

Yesterday was the first I had seen of David's four posts. I've not yet had a chance to study them in detail or read the interesting comments.

My first reaction was to wonder if increasing number of blogs has anything to do with the fact that Blogger.com offers free blogspots and hosting and, not too long ago, introduced a load of new and attractive features making it even easier to start a free blogspot.

David explains Technorati now tracks over 4 million weblogs; it tracked the 3 Millionth weblog on July 7th, just 3 months ago; the blogosphere has been doubling at a regular pace, and it is now more than 8 times as large as it was in June of 2003; the slowest rate at which the blogosphere has doubled in size is once every 5 months.

Maybe blogs need to be viewed as web pages. Many of us loyal Blogger.com users have started up more than one free blogspot. This blog has no categories, and so I started a dozen new blogspots (see sidebar) to serve as categories/files. Now it is easier for me to scroll through posts in one category and link to any of them - from here. If one million other Blogger users did the same, it would mean *gulp* twelve million new blogs, making it seem that blogging was catching on like wildfire.

My second reaction, again to do with Blogger.com, is that Blogger's new commenting facility accepts comments only from people who are registered as having a blogspot. I've noticed a few Typepad users have set up blogspots with the sole purpose of being able to comment at blogspots. In their free blogspot via Blogger they provide a link to their Typepad blog.

Thanks to David for the following four posts on the state of blogosphere - and for Technorati, the Blogosphere wouldn't be as great without it.

Part 1: State of the Blogosphere
Part 2: 4.6 posts per second
Part 3: Big Media vs. Blogs
Part 4: Corporate Bloggers




Re graph A above, David writes: "Many of the volume increases were due to political events. Large spikes occurred around the Iowa Caucuses (the Howard Dean scream), the time of the Nick Berg beheading, when both conservative and liberal bloggers posted prolifically on the new form of terrorist threat, and around both major American political conventions, where bloggers were feted as well."




Re graph B above, David writes: "The chart above shows a graph of the most influential or authoritative blogs as compared with the most authoritative “big media” sites. Certainly, top-quality journalism, interesting articles, and consistency of quality show why the top big media sites are on top. But it also shows that a large number of people are getting news, information, and opinion from outside of the mainstream media, and that these sources are rivaling or exceeding the attention paid to smaller “professional” sites."
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I'd like to see a visual of blogs and big media covering the same conversation. That way, when an issue is started by blogs, one can see how long it takes for the story to catch on with big media - and track when the story is tailing off by blogs and big media.

Graph B above, could show certain topics of conversation by blogs (in red) compared to the same topics covered by big media (in blue). For example, on the Dean Scream, who talked about it most, blogs or big media? And who talked about it first, blogs or big media? When did it tail off with big media?

The Sudan crisis is another example. Genocide in Darfur was picked up by American blogger Jim Moore in April of this year when big media reports were few and far between. In April the Darfur crisis had been going on for 14 months and 10,000 deaths had been reported (figure now stands at 70,000 deaths since March).

Having given the Darfur crisis new Google juice, at what point did the big media start reporting in earnest? As the Dean Scream happened way before last April, I'm looking forward to the day when David and his great team can come up with a graph that proves bloggers got Darfur into the world's spotlight.