We here at Technorati think that all your blogs are priceless. But when Weblogs Inc. was bought by AOL a few weeks ago, Tristan Louis did the math. He figured out how much each blog in the Weblogs Inc. stable was worth, based on their Technorati rank.
Inspired, Dane Carlson whipped up a handy little calculator with the Technorati API. Just enter your blog URL to see how much it's "worth" using the Weblogs/AOL math. Give it a try!
Oh, and if your worth boils down to less than the cost of a cup of coffee, don't feel bad. Our humble Technorati blog won't be breaking any records anytime soon.
Just after 12:45 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday 23rd October, Technorati counted its 20 millionth blog. It was Les CE2/CM2 Anquetil, a blog from an elementary school in Reims, France, in the heart of Champagne country. They started the blog to celebrate running 2 miles in a Relay Marathon.
The 10 millionth blog, 飞啊,飞啊,飞 - 博客.CN[blogger.cn/blog/中国/china], a Chinese blog about glass, was found on May 14th, so the 'doubling every five months' that Dave observed in his latest State of the Blogosphere still holds true.
It is that time of the year again, and I've got some new information on the continued growth of the blogosphere. I made this presentation as part of my 10 minute talk at Web 2.0 on October 6, 2005. You can download the entire presentation, complete with underlying data as well, for research use, or to make part of other presentations. All I ask is that you keep attribution and the Technorati logo in a prominent place wherever the data is used.
Earlier State of the Blogosphere reports are available as well - from August 2005, from March 2005, and from October 2004.
So, What's New?
Well, first, the basics. The chart below shows the continued growth of the blogosphere. Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs, and the total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months. This trend has been consistent for at least the last 36 months. In other words, the blogosphere has doubled at least 5 times in the last 3 years. Another way of looking at it is that the blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago:
The next chart shows the number of new blogs tracked each day by Technorati. About 70,000 new weblogs are tracked every day, which is about a new weblog created each second, somewhere in the world. It also appears that blogging is taking off around the world, and not just in English. Some of the significant increases we've seen over the past 3 months have been due to a proliferation of chinese-speaking weblogs, both on MSN Spaces as well as on Chinese sites like blogcn.com.
Now that we've been tracking spam and fake blogs, we've included the daily tracking statistics for spam and fake blogs from June 1, 2005. We are currently tracking about 2% - 8% of new weblogs are fake or spam weblogs. They are represented as the red spikes that are over and above the legitimate (human-created and updated) blogs shown in blue below.
Spam Attacks
In the last couple of days, there's been a lot of talk about a set of spam blogs that have been set up to do keyword stuffing using a lot of popular phrases, including many popular bloggers' names. Lots of people have discussed this, including Tim Bray, Dave Winer, Ed Cone, Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Jeff Jarvis, and others. In order to adequately analyze this, I updated the chart to include the blog data we've been tracking all the way up to yesterday, October 16, 2005.
In the past 2 weeks, there were 805,000 new weblogs created. In addition, Technorati tracked an additional 39,000 new fake and spam weblogs, which means that about 4.6% of the total weblogs tracked were fake or spam.
One of the remarkable things that comes out of looking at the data is that while spam and fake blogs are a problem, they are not an overwhelming problem - In fact, we've experienced much worse spam attacks in the past. The key difference in the spam attack over the weekend is that the attackers' posts included many popular search terms including popular bloggers' names - which is a common ego search on engines like Technorati. This made this particular attack much more visible to a number of high profile bloggers than attacks in the past.
A look at the posting volume over the last year is illustrative as well, and is included in the chart below:
You can see from the post statistics that there are on average, between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts made each day. That's about 33,000 posts per hour. Spam and fake posts are reported here as well, and on average an additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are spam or fake. This number changes on a daily basis as we track spam attacks, and have reached as high as an additional 18% over the regular daily volume.
One may argue that the numbers I'm reporting are way too low, or that Technorati isn't finding all of the spam weblogs out there. That's a legitimate argument, and by no means am I asserting that Technorati is capturing all of the spam and fake weblogs in existence. We know we're not getting them all, and every day we're working on improving our algorithms and data quality. However, our hard work means that we can still provide you with comprehensive timely results without having to do anything drastic, like removing a major hosting provider with millions of legitimate blogs from our indexes.
We're also working closely with the other players in the industry in order to close the gaps. In September, we helped organize the second Web 2.0 Spam summit, and representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Six Apart, Tucows, Wordpress, Feedster, and many more companies and organizations participated. The summit was quite successful, and I expect that there will be many more to come.
To summarize:
- As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 million weblogs
- The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
- The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
- About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
- About a new weblog is created each second
- 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
- Between 700,000 and 1.3 million posts are made each day
- About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
- An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average
What's Next?
Of course, one important question rears its head - how to make sense out of this monstrous onrush of conversation, and just get what you want - the best information from the most authoritative or influential people, in the most timely manner.
More on that in my next two posts, covering the growth of tags and of context in search and discovery.
I'm pleased to announce that Technorati and Edelman have completed a report that examines how traditional blogging and PR intersect and what bloggers think about mainstream companies. The full results are now available.
Thank you to the 821 participants in the Technorati/Edelman PR Survey.
We quantified some interesting perspectives of the blogging community and its perception of corporate communication. Some highlights:
- 34% primarily blog to be seen as an authority in their field.
- Over 50% blog about companies at least once per week.
- 63% believe blogs are the most trustworthy source of product information.
- Over 98% take steps to correct factually incorrect portions of a blog post.
- Over 80% prefer to receive information from non-executives.
- Blogs of individual employees are considered more trustworthy than blogs endorsed by a corporation.
Technorati continues to work with public relations firms and corporate communications team to better understand the best practices of blog interaction. We believe that markets are conversations and will continue to seek out new ways to add information and context to conversations online.
Here at Technorati, we just love new features. And we released a couple this week that are all about new ways to search.
Search This Blog
There's a new link in keyword search results: "Search this blog." Click it to search an individual blog for any term. For example, ever wondered how many times Boing Boing has mentioned copyright? Turns out the answer is 487 as of today.
You can also search by blog URL from the Search main page or any of the Search Options boxes. And for all you members with claimed blogs, you can search your own blog from your profile page. Give it a try!
Search in Blog Finder
There's a new feature in Blog Finder, too. Check out the new search box on the right side of every Blog Finder page. That enables you to search the most authoritative bloggers in each category for any text you like.
Say you were checking out all those hot Political blogs. Wanna see what they're saying about "Bush" today? Search away! Or maybe you'd prefer to see what Gardening blogs have to say about "bush." You can do that too!
You can access this new feature from the Search main page or any of the Search Options boxes, too.
We've been making a lot of updates and tweaks to our backend, as described at the beginning of the month. Most of these changes have been around speed and performance, and I hope that you've noticed the difference. We've also been listening to a lot of your feedback and comments. There's still a lot more to do, and we will continue to improve site functionality and speed.
For URL search, we've been looking closely at how we calculate the number of links and sources pointing to a blog, and we've made some tweaks to the display to better surface recent blog activity. Technorati now displays the total number of links from blogs over the last 6 months. Up until now, we displayed a count of all links from blog homepages, which tended to weight more highly blogs that have been around for a long time, even if they have not been posting recently.
The change affects how Technorati ranks its over 18.5 million blogs. Our new link counts expose more active blogs and rising stars, allowing readers to discover blogs currently receiving the attention of the blogosphere.
Michael Barnett (interdictor), a blogger who actively covered Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, is an example of an emerging
blog of interest in the past few months. Interdictor is currently the 90th most uniquely cited blog tracked by Technorati.
How things work
Technorati determines a blog's ranking based on the number of links from unique blogs over the last 6 months. If John links to Susie 5 times in 5 months Technorati will count 5 new links to Susie from 1 unique source. Susie's rank will change based on this 1 new source.
We hope you find this change a useful metric for the discovery and evaluation of blogs. We continue to store all blog links over the history of Technorati -- almost 3 years! -- and we will continue to evaluate best practices for determining the authority of a weblog. A complete list of links to a blog is still available through our URL search results.
What do you think of the changes? Spotted a bug or inconsistency? Send us a note and let us know how we may be of service. Our staff continues to work night and day to create the most accurate and useful service for you. Some of the best ideas and improvements of the Technorati service have come from you, our community of users. We'll keep the light on for you. :)
Technorati and Edelman are partnering in an attempt to better understand how blogging and traditional PR intersect, and what bloggers think about communication from mainstream companies. Edelman is a global public relations firm representing brands such as Xbox, Nissan, and Dove. Working together, we created a 18-question survey to better understand the blogging community and your preferred methods of hearing from companies.
Is receiving a press release from a PR agency just more spam? What about product discounts or free goods? Are there better ways for traditional marketers and bloggers to interact? What is the implicit contract created when marketers and bloggers communicate? What are the ethical questions? What are companies not listening to that they should be listening to?
Please take a few minutes to answer the survey. This survey is intended as a starting point for discussion, and not a comprehensive be-all, end-all survey. Personally identifiable information is not tracked but you may explicitly give us permission upon submission to send you the final results of the survey. We will review the aggregated results and include the findings in a public white paper next month to help inform bloggers, companies, and public relations firms. All survey respondents have the option to receive this white paper via e-mail as soon as it is available.
Technorati is organizing the second Web Spam Summit taking place next week at Google's headquarters in Mountain View. Technical leaders from companies and projects involved in publishing and indexing content on the web will come together for a day-long summit to exchange best practices and cultivate new ways of addressing spam as a community.
The summit will focus on web spam and include product development updates since the first web spam squashing summit in February. Web spam includes comment spam, link spam, TrackBack spam, tag spam, and fake weblogs.
Key industry players such as Ask Jeeves, Feedster, Google, Microsoft, Six Apart, Tucows, WordPress, and Yahoo! have all confirmed their attendance. Technical members of products involved in the fight against web spam are invited to attend the Web Spam Summit. If you or another member of your team would like to attend please send a prompt reply to rsvp@technorati.com with some introductory information about you and your product including a paragraph about each of the following topics.
- Problem Statement: describe a form of web spam currently facing your product.
- Current Solutions: describe a current solution you have implemented and how it works.
- In Development: describe a solution you are working on and why it will be better.
The summit will not be broadcast. This privacy allows the best possible technical members directly involved in the fight against web spam to attend the summit with full candor.
The blogosphere is abuzz with Google's launch of their Blog Search. So far things look pretty interesting, and having a big traditional search player like Google working on blog search is a validation moment for the entire blogosphere.
This will mark a major milestone for the World Live Web. At Technorati, we have a tremendous amount of respect for the Google team and for everything they've done in the world of search. I'm sure that they'll continue to improve over the coming months, perhaps including tags, recent images and links, zeitgeists, blogger tools, and other types of semistructured data. I'm sure that they'll also start indexing the full-text of blog posts, not just the partial text found in most blog feeds.
I welcome the competition. We've got some tricks up our sleeves too - and there's no doubt that in the end, the competition will end up producing more innovation and better services for bloggers and readers.
Welcome to the party, Google!
One of the great things about working at a company like Technorati is that when people talk about you, you know. So to all the people who've given Blog Finder a spin and emailed or posted feedback, we thank you. Your feedback is helping us making Technorati better!
If you tried Blog Finder last week and it seemed like your tags weren't being saved, please give it another try. We had a problem that affected a small percentage of users, but it should be all better now. And, as always, tell us how we're doing.
And special thanks to Technorati member Hans Mestrum, who made a fabulous screencast about Blog Finder in Dutch and English. If you're not sure how to get your blog listed, this is a great step-by-step guide. Thanks, Hans!
Still have questions about Blog Finder that aren't answered in the screencast or on the Blog Finder Help page? Contact us - we're always happy to help.
Derek Powazek
on October 24, 2005.
Tags: Blogging
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