Joining the 200-Million Blog Contingent
Blogs, short for web logs, are online chronicles of news, ideas, facts, and opinions. They’re part editorial, part journal, and a good part dialogue between the blogger and the blog’s readers.
The number of blogs published worldwide is a moving target, but the ticker along the top of microblogging site Tumblr showed nearly 55 million blogs in early 2012. The WordPress site ticker at the same time showed nearly 75 million sites. That’s 130 million blogs right there. Add in self-hosted sites and sites on other platforms and estimates of 200 million blogs are well within the realm of reason.
What’s more, people are actually reading all that blog content. A tracking study by NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, showed that three of the ten largest social networks — Blogger, WordPress, and Tumblr — drew a combined 80 million unique visits during a single month in 2011, accounting for one in four active online users in the United States.
Who blogs?
Technorati (http://technorati.com
), the first blog search engine and host of the Internet’s leading blog directory, compiles statistics on who blogs and why. Technorati reports that bloggers fall into these categories:
Hobbyists who blog for fun (61 percent)
Professional full- or part-time bloggers ...
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