The Butt Ugly Weblog

Bloggers all over the world

Technorati says it tracks 322,746 weblogs (at this moment). There have been estimates that there are roughly perhaps a million bloggers.

In the BlogTalk 2003 conference a bunch more numbers are presented, shamelessly copied from David Weinberger's coverage:

• Poland has 100,000 webloggers, 62% of them women
• Iran has 12,000 webloggers, 75% men. Six of the top 10 blogs are about sex.
• Spain has around 2,000 weblogs.

To cap this off, data from Pinseri:

• Finland has 284 weblogs (that are tracked by Pinseri).

That's just four countries. To me this suggests that the suggestion by Meg Hourihan at ETCon was correct: Part of the blogosphere is unidirectional. We can't read Iranian weblogs, but they sure can read all English weblogs. There could be (and is) an incredible amount of activity and innovation going on, and the US-centric high-end blogging world would never know about it!. For example, the most popular Finnish weblog Pinseri is doing all sorts of interesting stuff, analyzing the readers of the weblogs instead of the writers.

In fact, there probably already are more non-English weblogs than there are English weblogs. The English weblogs are, however, obviously the glue between the different "bubbles" of blogospheres - obviously none of the bubbles can communicate between each other except via using a common language.