Heather Green of Business Week did some digging on the number of active blogs.
Seems that if you only count the ones that have posted in the last 90 days, the 70 million number quoted so often as the size of the blogosphere drops to 15.5 Million ‘active’ blogs.
Personally I think 90 days is a bit long between posts to consider a blog active – but the point is pretty clear – even with a generous definition of active the blogosphere is no-where near as big as 70 Million.
The other thing Heather reports on is the rate of growth is slowing – possibly for two reasons:
- as those interest in blogging have already taken the plunge
- other social media are competing for attention and time
Either could be true. And 15.5M voices may not be 70M but it still is profoundly more than were engaged in public discussion even 10 years ago.
And that’s a good thing.
[...] 90 jours, comme le fait remarquer Pete Child , est encore un critère bien laxiste (quand je n’interviens pas sur Transnets pendant trois [...]
It was only a few months ago that the Technorati kids’ motto was “5 million blogs - some have to be good!”.