BLOG AROUND THE WORLD
David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati has a follow-up to his post a couple of weeks ago on the fast-growth trends of blogs (see earlier piece here, along with my post on it here).
This time, the focus is on the international metrics in blog growth that Technorati observes. The big take away?
That less that a third of the blogs indexed globally by Technorati are English-language blogs.
This is consistent with the statistics for the broader web. As I noted in a post a few weeks ago, almost 70% of the broader internet can be read in languages other than English. And that component is growing fast.
Other takeaways from David Sifry's post are as follows:
- The blogosphere is multilingual, and deeply international
- English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts in April 2006.
- Japanese and Chinese language blogging has grown significantly.
- Chinese language blogging, while continuing to grow on an absolute basis, has begun to decline as an overall percentage of the posts that Technorati tracks over the last 6 months
- Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and German are the languages with the greatest number of posts tracked by Technorati.
- The Korean language is underrepresented in this analysis
- Language breakdown does not necessarily imply a particular country or regional breakdown.
- Technorati now tracks more than 100 Million author-created tags and categories on blog posts.
- The rel-tag microformat has been adopted by a number of the large tool makers, making it easy for people to tag their posts. About 47% of all blog posts have non-default tags or categories associated with them."
Obviously Japanese and Chinese are the next two largest languages represented.
Given that India has not yet seen the same penetration of people and households online as China, and that English is the pre-dominant language used by Indians who are currently online, we may see a bump up in the English representation as Indians ramp up going online over the next few years.
Until then, we should watch Japan, China and Korea.
The full post is worth reading as it has some additional illustrative slides.
I wonder if what the word for "blog" is in all these other languages.
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