LiveJournal: 1.5 million active users

LiveJournal is up to 1.3 million active users (updating a journal in the last 30 days). Other blogfarms using LiveJournal's software account for another 180 thousand active users, mostly at GreatestJournal.com (97k), DeadJournal.com (39k), and Blurty.com (36k).

This puts the greater LiveJournal community at 1.5 million active users on 6.3 million registered accounts.

In May 2003, 70 weeks ago, LiveJournal had 485k active users. So 1,338k comes from 1.5% weekly compound growth or 7% monthly growth.

Using Elise Bauer's estimate of LiveJournal's 23% GoogleShare, this would put the number of Google-visible blogs at 6.6 million active users (very rough). I'll qualify this number soon.

Source (29 August 2004)	Cumulative accounts	Active in Last 30 Days
livejournal.com	4 346 145	1 337 754
greatestjournal.com	497 134	97 303
deadjournal.com	467 746	38 727
blurty.com	835 772	36 496
crazylife.org	34 537	1 974
aboutmylife.net	26 807	1 825
plogs.net	6 983	1 126
weedweb.net	19 379	1 084
journalfen.net	5 230	596
insanejournal.com	6 605	543
socialjournal.com	5 255	189
needlesspanic.com	26 515	142
minilog.com	8 774	120
blog.mweb.co.za	565	59

Blogcount.com Correspondents Wanted

It's a big blogosophere, too big for one person to cover. Maybe you can help. Blogcount needs analysts to cover all of this beat.

• Growth outside the Anglo-sphere. By language. By country. Or whatever you think.
• Blogfarms.
• Inside the enterprise.
• Feedspace.

If you'd like to join this blog, let me know. pwolff@dijest.com, leave a comment here, or philw on Yahoo! IM.

More bloggers cover the Olympics than covered the Democrat Convention.

ATHENS: Isabelle Hontebeyrie lists 53 weblogs blogging from the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. More than the three dozen credentialed to Boston Democratic convention. More than the dozen credentialed to the GOP convention in New York. More than some countries.

Feedster is compiling an Olympic blogger aggregator.

Update: JLR commented... "Please don't forget an original mobile agregator of OlympicBloggers.com.

Business Week says 20,000 blogs in whole blogoshpere. Oops.

In an article by Olga Kharif called Blogging for Business:

"In fact, these blogs, which now account for a handful of the estimated 20,000 blogs on the Web, could eventually grab a lion's share of the Internet audience, says Chris Charron, an analyst with tech consultancy Forrester Research in Boston."

That's off by how many zeros? Three? Four? 2 million weblogs? 20 million? I mean, Technorati is tracking 3.5 million, and they don't have everything. Where did Kharif get the number? Just email press@dijest.com for a quick and reliable estimate.

Does ping data show power law applies to weblog market share?

FRANCE: Jean-Luc of mediaTIC referred me Stephane Le Solliec's study of blogfarm share using weblogs.com data.

From bsentinel, pings by source:

1. 46390 (12.75%) : blogspot.com
2. 37921 (10.42%) : modblog.com
3. 32563 (8.95%) : persianblog.com
4. 23255 (6.39%) : blogdrive.com
5. 11604 (3.19%) : livejournal.com
6. 6651 (1.83%) : 20six.fr
7. 5565 (1.53%) : myblog.de
8. 4776 (1.31%) : co.uk
9. 4558 (1.25%) : tblog.com
10. 3603 (0.99%) : csdn.net

These from 363,889 weblogs.

Please pardon my poor translation from French.

28 June 2004

For the last two or three weeks I looked at all the blogs noted as updated on http://www.weblogs.com/ and I compiled them by hand (finally, almost) in a small list.

The small list makes now more than 130,000 blogs.

To see which were the most used farms with blogs, I created a small page which lists, by fields, the blogs of my list: shares of the blogosphère.

One can notice:

• blogspot is first with almost 15% of shares to go. Ok, not bad.
• persianblog in second. Large surprise. Considering its alphabet, impossible for me to really know. Are the Arab language weblogs in another country, although blogs of Iran?
• 3rd, 4th and 5th: blogdrive, livejournal and modblog (I did not know this last)
• 6th: 20six.fr

20six.fr largely replaces joueb.com, the first French-speaking platform of blogging, three years' old. U-blog.net is difficult to measure, because only the paying blogs can automatically ping www.weblogs.com (the free ones must to do it manually).

What is also interesting to see, is that of all the 20six platforms, the French site is in first place. The German site has a third of the blogs. Cock-a-doodle-doo! France (or rather French-speaking people) seems to be completely many bloggeurs.

As regards TypePad, which is the most advanced solution that I know, it finds 1 percent, which is not so bad since it is also the most expensive solution, in a world where the free ones are almost omnipresent.

At the end, these statistics are to be taken for this what they are. As I explained at the beginning of this post, I only entered blogs which ping http://www.weblogs.com/. This excludes all the blogs that:

• do not have this functionality
• didn't want to activate this functionality (common in private blogs)

All the same, it is a reliable indicator and in real time.

Conclusion: The blogosphere is incredibly dispersed. The first 100 sites represent only 37,000 blogs [28%] out of the 130,000 of my list.

P.S.: The next stage will be to scan all the blogs to extract the GENERATOR tag to know which software are most used.

P.P.S.: A small coat of paint on bsentinel would be good, but I think other tricks are to be made now.

Jean Luc writes:

It is far from obvious how to evaluate blog system share.

Elise Bauer produced an analysis of the shares of market of blogs in this post: "An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market" while basing itself on this methodology:

"To try to get an answer to this question I've turned to Google. By typing in the domain name of a tool you can find the number of web pages that link to the domain name and the number of pages that contain the search term of that domain name."

The results are surprising in more than one way. As it is indicated in the comments, one notes the absence of B2 evolution, a blog system well-known and used (more especially as B2 is not new) but also of very dynamic platforms such PersianBlog, Polish solutions or the whole of the blogs 20Six (France, Germany, Great Britain, Netherlands) which carry a considerable weight.

Like Phil Wolff specifies in an article for BlogCount, it is significant to wonder about why certain solutions of blogs are better referenced in Google compared to others.

This analysis of Elise Bauer is thus partial (as she specifies it) but as one of the competitive metrics the blogging market is to quantify, qualify and to characterize these market shares, it is included/understood well that the stake is serious.

It would undoubtedly be necessary initially and easily to cross these figures with other search engines... Cross analyze also with BSentinel de Stéphane Solliec which screens more than 350,000 blogs in the world. JLR

Unlike Google, bsentinel reflects active weblogs.

My bsentinel wishlist:

1. More ping servers. Many ping servers are used today, at least a dozen widely. Include more of them, eliminating duplicate pings.
2. Collect time data. When do Xanga users post vs. LiveJournal users? How are shares changing over time?
3. Collect post-level data. Weblogs are one thing, but posting activity is another. What is the market share by post? How often to Diarylanders post vs. Blogspotters? TypePad.fr vs. TypePad.de?
4. Check for sub-blog pings. I use Radio UserLand for one of my weblogs. Each post belongs to one or more categories, seen on my web server as a separate weblog. Radio pings for each updated "category" even though I only published one article. The clue: 3 pings in 10 seconds from the same weblog.
5. Check for "update" pings. If a second ping comes from the same blog in 3 minutes, it is probably just typing and not a new post. What percent of pings are updates?
6. Spider. Other forms of discovery, like crawling, are more expensive (time, bandwidth, computation) but yield more data. Generator tags, as you said. Sometimes language and geography data.

My guts tell me there are around 10 million active weblogs in the world. So bsentinel is picking up about 1 percent. Does using ping data introduce much bias?

Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad have 68% GoogleShare

Elise Bauer asks: which blog publishing systems share the market?

Working from Google hits, Ms. Bauer reports market share:

• 30% - Blogger
• 23% - Live Journal
• 15% - TypePad
• 7% - Diaryland
• 7% - Movable Type
• 18% - other

She cautions that some blogs are invisible (dark blogosphere) and some are hyperlocal (linking within communities).

Why are some blogging tools or platforms more Google friendly than others, at least in terms of this kind of study?

• Strong vs. Weak Template Branding. Some tools make it easy to hide the makers 's mark on your weblog. As more people use pre-built templates from hosted services like The Big Four (Blogger, LJ, TP, and DiaryLand), they are more likely to keep the "powered by" link, than bother to remove it.
• Ping Power. How does a search engine know you've updated? One way is that your blogging tool says so. Ping servers receive a short notice that your site is updated. Does the vendor default to public notification of updates to your site? Do they notify more than one ping server? If so, search engines like Google and Technorati are more likely to discover more blogs and more pages on those blogs.
• Per-Post-Privacy. Live Journal, Xanga, and other tools provide access control for each post. This means that while your home page may be public, many of your blog post archive pages are hidden. This reduces both page count and new blog discovery.
• Family Plans. Does the vendor build in incentives for users to pimp their friends, bringing others into a platform and to use the same tool? For example, SixApart has commentor authentication (single-sign-on) across all TypePad and many Movable Type sites. You can't share your private Live Journal post with a friend unless she registers. AOL lets you blend relationships across media, from your buddies' IMs to their weblogs to their emails. This keeps the brand prominent and visible to Google.
• Built-In Search. Blogging tools that use in-house search don't push Google to recrawl existing weblogs.
• SEO'd Templates. There's a whole profession of Search Engine Optimization. This affects ranking and visibility. Some vendors templates are more SEOptimized than others.
• Off-Brand Software. Firms like Movable Type and pMachine make software. They run on private servers, not hosted. This means it's more likely to be completely debranded. Even though Google may crawl the page, it may not link back to the vendor, and won't show up in a search for "pMachine".

Other market share questions to ask:

• Share of active users? Millions of weblog pages discovered by Google are on unborn (never got started) or dead weblogs.
• Contrast with other search engines? Are all search engines equal?
• By country? Blogging platforms popular in Iran, Poland, and China didn't make the list.
• Behind firewalls? Perhaps by survey methods.
• Share of paying users? What's the share of those willing to pay for weblog software or hosting?
• Share by use? Diarists vs. Individual Blogger vs. Workplace Blogs.

via Marc's Voice.

Iraq: 67 blogs

IRAQ: Iraq Blog Count : Because every web log counts. IBC is a group blog (maybe I should take a hint from that) that's become a hub of online community. In a place where the phones don't work and the country's domain (.iq) is still turned off, there's still some serious blogging going on. Some are expatriot sites, but the growth is in homegrown bloggers. Most are in Arabic but some are Kurdish. National directories start with blogrolls, then outgrow them. It won't be long now.

BlogTalk fire drill in Wien

Many people shot photos of blogtalk, conveying the excitement of an academic confab. But on my first night in Vienna, the Thursday before, the Atlas had a fire alarm. Snapshot of people milling about outside at 3am. Nothing burned, nobody hurt. To my knowledge I was the only blogger to leave the building.

More dark blogosphere. Blogging secretly outside the firewall.

Do you blog in secret?

Data Point 1: Ben and Mena Trott said about 33% of TypePad weblog users run their blogs with some level of privacy, at BlogTalk 2 Vienna.

Data Point 2: I looked at LiveJournal's count of active weblogs a few weeks ago. Their servers report 547,157 blogs updated in the last 30 days. NITLE's census reports 331,550 active blogs at LiveJournal. Why does NITLE miss 40%?

First, I'm going to trust that LJ isn't in error or lying.

Second, NITLE's collection grows from a combination of:

• ping records (blogs updating a public ping server)
• suggestions (you can recommend a link)
• following links from one blog to another (web bots spidering)
• classifying pages as either a blog or not a blog

There may be errors or inefficiencies on any of these, but I'll assume for the moment that LJ blogs ping by default, the NITLE spiders are thorough, and the blog recognizer is accurate.

If both LJ and NITLE are telling the truth, what gives?

Most of the LJ 40% unreported are active blogs that are private to public scrutiny. One of the attractions of LJ is the ability to control who reads your blog. For each post you can choose to keep it private (blogging to yourself), to share it with a friends list and/or an individual, or to make it public. Of the 60% that NITLE found, any of those blogs may have some hidden posts. The 40% are just completely opting out of Google scrutiny.

So, roughly a third of LJ blogs are invisible to the public. By choice.

A technical point: this kind of control only works with dynamic blog services, services that produce each page as demanded, customized for each reader. Most, like Blogger and Moveable Type, produce static pages, their html written once for everyone. As a result, most of the blogging APIs (instructions for programmers) don't include access control options. This is an area for future work.

As intranet and extranet blogging takes off, look for similar behavior within firewalls and strong demand for access control.

110 million people read weblogs? Blog recognition rises: Blogs beat Britney Spears by 23%

NEW YORK: Steve Rubel writes:

According to Google News, since July 2 [2004] there have been more than 3,470 online news articles that have mentioned either blogs, weblogs, blog or weblog! This by far eclipses the number of articles that have mentioned Britney Spears in the same period (2,820).

So the ability to recognize a weblog has been rising, perhaps catching up to actual readership of weblogs.

How big is that readership?

The February 29, 2004 Pew Internet and American Life Project report (web summary or full report in pdf) of by Amanda Lenhart, Deborah Fallows, John Horrigan says:

• A mere 2% of Adult Internet users maintain Web diaries or Web blogs, according to respondents to this phone survey.
• Between 2% and 7% of adult Internet users have created diaries or blogs, per other phone surveys prior to this one, and one more recently fielded in early 2004
• In this survey we found that 11% of Internet users have read the blogs or diaries of other Internet users.
• About a third of these blog visitors have posted material to the blog. Most of those who do contribute material are not constantly updating or freshening content. Rather, they occasionally add to the material they have posted, created, or shared.

Rubel again:

Despite the huge buzz, however, the vast majority of Americans still probably do not know what blogs are. ... My theory is that this number is actually far higher because many news consumers can’t differentiate blogs from professional sites because of their high-quality design and content.

Compare and contrast the following sites, for example … Gawker vs. New York Magazine PaidContent.org vs. MediaWeek Not much difference right?

Rubel argues for improved labeling that "I am a weblog". On the other hand, the blogging form may simply be absorbed into other media as a best practice for some types of communication, collaboration, and community.

Let's examine the numbers further. In past studies, the number of people reading was twice the number writing. Presumably, 50% of the reading were community were bloggers reading other bloggers. This observation may be supported by power law statistics from Technorati that show most blogs (in the tail of the curve) are read by a handful of people. However, if readership is being directed from outside the blogosphere, perhaps from Google and other search engines, this ratio may no longer apply.

We may also be noticing a drift in the definition of "blogging " by the Internet at large. This first came to my attention on the Howard Dean 2004 presidential campaign weblog, where people who posted comments to a weblog post started to call those comments "blogs". Per David Weinberger, this blurring of blogging and commenting is useful in community building. Among other things, it lowers barriers to participation (it is easier/simpler to comment than post) and creates context for conversation (blog fodder) . It also affects our ability to measure readership.

With an Internet population of about 1 billion users worldwide and 186 million in the US (ClickZ Stats) then:

• Blog Authoring: 2% - 7% (Is this a huge spread?) =
• 3.7 - 13.0 bloggers in the US
• 20 - 70 million bloggers worldwide
• Blog Reading: 11% =
• 20.4 million blog readers in the US
• 110 million readers worldwide

I'd want to question whether the Pew results can be extended worldwide, given their methodology, but it seems likely.