Kevin Burton responds to David Sifry's latest State of the Blogosphere post, unconvinced by the claim that there are now fifty million extant blogs:
"These numbers are overly optimistic and dangerous. There are not 50 million blogs. Blogs are great and all but too much hype is a bad thing.
"There might have been 50 million blogs that have ever been created but there aren't 50 million blogs in active use."
There is dispute in the comments to both Burton's and Sifry's posts about how best to define "active" blogs, and multiple commenters have called on Technorati to make an attempt at providing this statistic, however defined. Preferring to start from the datum which says there are about 1.6 million blog posts per day, and extrapolating from post-frequency criteria for active blogs, Burton says:
"Lets be generous and say that a blog has to post at least once per day to be considered active.
"This means that on any given day Technorati only has 1.6M active blogs which is a LOT smaller than the 50 million number that Technorati claims.
"Lets assume some even more pessimistic numbers. Lets say that 50% of users post once per day and the other 50% post once per week. This still only yields 6.4M blogs. Still far short of the 50M that Technorati claims."
He concludes that while the total number of blogs is still increasing exponentially, the number of active blogs is far smaller and increasing linearly.
On the other hand, commenters also point out that Technorati's numbers reflect only the number of blogs they have indexed, and should not be taken as the final word on blog counts across the world; given blind spots such as private blogs and untracked foreign blogging sites, these commenters argue, the true numbers may be much higher than even Technorati's current claim.
Balancing these conflicting arguments is tricky, but they're nothing new. In April 2005, Perseus predicted a total of more than 53 million hosted blogs by the end of that year, and as early as October 2003 had pointed out the prevalence of private and abandoned blogs. Today's contributions to the continuing debate go to show that determining precise statistics about the blogosphere is still far off from being an exact science. Not only are blog counts subject to questions of accuracy and completeness, the very definitions of seemingly basic terms are up for grabs as analysts continually revise their criteria and calculations.
The only sure conclusion that can be drawn from these reports is that blogging continues to grow into the global awareness. Whether the relevant increase in blog numbers is exponential or linear, it remains an increase. The details of that growth can be weighed against one another in a number of different ways; if a consensus is ever reached choosing one method as best, we might be able to answer these questions with some clarity. Until that time, each will have to set the scales as he deems fit—and keep a few grains of salt on hand to couterbalance those claims he finds askew.