The latest count of blogs by the Blog Herald finds 200,000,000 blogs worldwide. But how many of these blogs are not splogs or abandoned blogs? A Washington Post article by Steven Luxenberg (whose Outlook column is ending) says there are 5.5 million bloggers citing BlogPulse.com's number which includes only active blogs that have posts in the last 30 days.
The Internet, however, is 5,500,000 x 24/7. That is, there are an estimated
5.5 million active bloggers out there right now -- people who post their
thoughts on Web logs, or blogs, which are available to anyone with access to
a computer, at any time, 24 or 7.
Getting good numbers on blogging can be maddening, but by any measure, it's
clear that the blogosphere is expanding while newspaper circulation declines.
The 5.5 million figure comes from Intelliseek's BlogPulse (http://www.blogpulse.com ), which says it counts bloggers who have posted something publicly in the past 30 days. BlogPulse carries a running total of identified blogs on its Web site; last week it stood at nearly 22 million, and was growing at the rate of about 60,000 every 24 hours, according to Natalie Glance, a BlogPulse researcher.
The Blog Herald, a blog that covers the blogosphere, offers a much higher
number: more than 200 million blogs worldwide. Why the discrepancy? Because,
claims the Blog Herald's Duncan Riley, he counts blogs in all languages while
others count mostly those in English and the Romance languages. But the Blog
Herald number also includes inactive or abandoned blogs, as well as "private"
blogs that are password-protected and meant only for family and friends.
Whether it is 200 million or 5.5 million or something in between it is just a drop in the bucket when compared to the number of people in the world who are not blogging. The world's population is estimated to be about 6.5 million. So even if the 200 million blog total was used (with a 1:1 blog per person ratio) it would mean that about 3% of the world's population has a blog. This means that at least 97% of the world's population does not have a blog because some of those 200 million are bound to be splogs or abandoned blogs. With 5.5 million active blogs it means that just .084% of the world's population is actively blogging or that over 99.9% of humans are not active bloggers. Tech savvy nations would have a much higher percentage of active bloggers. It is when you factor in the blogless third world countries that the ratio of bloggers to non bloggers really plummets. This is an update to a post we ran a few months ago about there being 6.4 billion blogless people in the world. With the latest blog count from the Blog Herald there are now just 6.3 billion blogless people.
