At last: a proper weblog census

Thanks to Karlin Lillington for this — really useful for a piece I’m writing. “Jupiter Research has published some interesting figures on blogging. Somewhere between 2.4 and 2.9 million active blogs in existence, but they remain a tiny slice of web life. Only 2% of web users have created a blog, and only an estimated 4% read them (which is a good reminder to bloggers and media people to always explain the word weblog and blog and not assume your audience has any idea whatsoever of what you’re talking about :^) …). Blogging is split fairly evenly between genders, but more men than women read them (a 60/40 split). Nearly 3/4ths (73%) of blog readers have been online for 5 years or more, suggesting (to me) they are either fairly young or the more techie crowd that first jumped online.”

Karlin also publishes fascinating statistics about the languages in which Blogs are published. English predominates (as expected) but the next four are surprising (to me anyway): Portuguese, Polish, Farsi (yep!) and French.