Blogosphere Buzzing With Multiple Languages and Millions of Tags
David Sifry has a new State of the Blogosphere update. This one focuses on languages and tagging. In languages, Japanese is leading the pack followed by English and then Chinese.
Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.
Tagging has really spiked. David Sifry says Technorati shows that nearly one half of all blog posts now include tags and there are an average of 560,000 tags each day.
Nearly half (47%) of all blog posts have an author-generated category or set of tags associated with the post. For this analysis, Technorati excluded generic or default categories, like "General" or "Diary", which some services put into each post if the author doesn't specify a particular tag or category. We only counted posts that used a non-default tag or category.
Here are some of the highlights from Sifry's latest report.
The blogosphere is multilingual, and deeply international
English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts in April 2006.
Japanese and Chinese language blogging has grown significantly.
Chinese language blogging, while continuing to grow on an absolute basis, has begun to decline as an overall percentage of the posts that Technorati tracks over the last 6 months
Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and German are the languages with the greatest number of posts tracked by Technorati.
The Korean language is underrepresented in this analysis
Language breakdown does not necessarily imply a particular country or regional breakdown.
Technorati now tracks more than 100 Million author-created tags and categories on blog posts.
The rel-tag microformat has been adopted by a number of the large tool makers, making it easy for people to tag their posts. About 47% of all blog posts have non-default tags or categories associated with them.
