Annika points the way to an interesting survey of blogs and bloggers.
A couple of things jumped out at me.
BlogSpot and LiveJournal are the two market leaders, each with 31% of these hosted blogs. While BlogSpot is growing more quickly, its retention rate is lower, and the two sites should continue to race neck-and-neck in the near term in terms of active users.
Making BlogSpot the AOL of blogging. That's not really a surprise, because I've noticed a bias against BlogSpotters in the blogosphere.
Also, this survey only included Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga. Their rationale seems reasonable.
The report concludes that the blogosphere is like an iceberg, where a very few (the big boys) are read by thousands every day, yet the vast majority of blogs remain unseen by most, 'under the surface' if you will. They then discuss nanoaudiences (not to be confused with the off-Broadway production of Nano-Nanette) and the methodology used.
According to the report, this is the first in a series of surveys to be done. Future results will be interesting.
Posted by Ted at November 4, 2003 08:19 AM