State of the Blogosphere, February 2006 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
It's been 4 months since last October's State of the Blogosphere report, so it's time to update the numbers! For historical perspective, you can see earlier State of the Blogosphere reports from July 2005, from March 2005, and from October 2004.
Context & Ripple Effects
David Sifry's quarterly State of the Blogosphere series is how the young blog world measures itself — this update follows reports from July 2005, March 2005, and October 2004, and it lands in an environment where the medium's credibility is contested. Mainstream press scrutiny has been sharp: ABC's Silicon Insider took Forbes to task for its handling of the blogosphere just three months earlier.
The other shadow over the growth numbers is spam: The RSS Blog's October 2005 State of the Splogosphere documented how fake blogs were inflating the very indexes Sifry tracks, so every headline count now carries an asterisk about how much of it is machine-generated.
First-order effects
- Technorati re-cements its position as the de facto index of the blogosphere — media, marketers, and investors citing 'how big blogging is' will quote these numbers for the next quarter.
- Bloggers and readers get a fresh benchmark against the July 2005 and March 2005 baselines, making growth rate — not absolute size — the story people argue about.
Second-order effects
- Splog contamination means the headline growth figures double-count machines, forcing anyone using the data commercially to discount it — and giving index-quality, not just size, a competitive value.
- As mainstream outlets keep engaging with the blogosphere (the Forbes episode showed both the appetite and the missteps), demand grows for authoritative third-party measurement that Technorati alone currently supplies.
Third-order effects
- Whoever maintains the index defines the medium: control over the blogosphere's statistics concentrates interpretive power in one company, a structural role that invites challenges from rivals and skepticism from publishers being counted.
- If growth reporting keeps conflating genuine blogs with spam, the industry will eventually need audited or filtered metrics — an early instance of measurement integrity becoming a market of its own.
The trend: The blogosphere is maturing into a quantified market whose scale — and whose measurement — is owned by Technorati's periodic reports.