Sep 26 2007
Recounting Australian Blogs
A common search term that gets visitors to this blog is “How many Australian blogs are there?“.
Anyone who tracks the Aussosphere would love to have a definitive answer to this question. Of course, having a blog and having an active blog are two separate things.
The number of blogs also depends on whether you count the likes of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and StumbleUpon.
- Facebook reports over 571,000 members in the Australian network, but I know that not all Aussies are in that network.
- Ben Barren points to over a million Australian MySpace profiles (and that was well over a year ago)
- Anthony Dever points out there are over 23,000 Australians on StumbleUpon.
Other substantial Aussie blog counts:
- Ben Barren reports Gnoos is tracking around 10,000 Aussie Blogs (of which around 9,000 are personal – and around 10 times that from overseas)
- BlogNow reports 9,727 blogs
- Australian Blogs indexes 2,051 blogs
- The Australian Index tracks
3,115145,793 blogs (updated: see comments) - Blogs.com.au indexes around 3,600 blogs (if my maths is correct)
- Blog Catalog reports 1,580 Australian blogs
- Blog Shares has 2,806 Australian blogs
- Technorati reports 7,685 blogs tagged with “Australia” and 2,579 with “Australian“
I noticed today, however, that Blogger does actually count blogs that provide a location. They are reporting 142,000 Australian blogs.
Breaking these down by state and territory (just over 71,000 had nominated a state) – provides the following:
Given that Victoria represents around 24.8% of our population, can we surmise from this that Victorians are our nation’s most prolific bloggers?
Now if we could just get WordPress and TypePad to cough up some stats, we’d have a much better picture.
Anthony Dever is doing an excellent job of manually tracking Aussie blogs for his Australian blog search engine based on a customised Google search. While he does get many blog submissions, I know that he spends hours surfing and manually adding the Aussie blogs he finds. I call him a bloghound. I also know that he has approached the major blogging platforms for Aussie blog counts, but has had no luck.
Ben Barren also weighed in with the following guesstimate that there are around 50-100,000 Aussie blogs which update at least bi-monthly. He suggested that companies like Hitwise and the major blogging platforms would be able to provide more comprehensive raw data, but this would require analysis and there’s probably little commercial incentive to do so.
So, for the time being we’re still none the wiser and until we are, we have to be saddled with the label “under-represented“.
A Few Questions
- What ideas do you have for promoting Aussie blogs and bloggers?
- Do you think we do enough (considering the above named local blog searches and directories)? What are we lacking?
- If you were to set up a new domain for promoting the aussosphere what would you do with it?
8 Responses to “Recounting Australian Blogs”
Hey Meg,
Wow, so many numbers.
I think we’re doing as much as we can. Most Aussie bloggers I’ve come across blog on a .com name and host overseas, which makes it a little harder to track.
I guess what’s needed …might not be popular though
is that we probably need one of these directories to break out from the pack and be where every Aussie blogger goes to just by the fact that it’s a stand out. Once we get an idea which one will break out, us bloggers who are really pushing the Aussie blogopshere should then *really* push it.
But, I truly believe we’ll never really know how many Aussie blogs and bloggers are out there – we’ll have to count on all the mash-ups and tagging to give us an indication.
A new domain name to promote the Aussophere? I already see a handful of really cool domain names here. Not really knowing about them, but how can you go past Blogs.com.au – seems like an ideal vehicle to promote Australian blogs.
I think there is a lot more that can be done but I know for me unfortunately there isn’t a demand for the greater Australian blogosphere that can necessitate the business case to devote the time, resources and funds to going further as quickly as I want to.
As an example, the blogs.com.au directory I have that isn’t live publicly is getting there but I have only tagged less than a 1/3 of the sites as there’s no point in bringing it online if it isn’t representative of what is available in all the little corners of the local blog community however I just don’t have the time to put into it for it being brought online any faster as I have have the strange necessity to fund food and shelter which blogs.com.au doesn’t do. Plus I want to do 100 other things but time and coin is lacking.
The lack of demand for Australian Blogs is best shown for my mind by almost the same SERPs position my site has for the search terms Australian Blogs and Blogs. Less than 100 people a month get to blogs.com.au by using Australian Blogs while 1000+ people a month arrive by typing Blogs into a search engine. Also the lack of demand is shown by number of people in both the Facebook group for Australian Bloggers and you Bump Zee community. Both are awesome initiatives especially your community but like I have discussed with you via email previously I just don’t think there is a huge number of people who identify themselves as a blogger and want to join, add their url or participate in something under that banner. They blog, they spend a considerable amount of time blogging, they read other blogs and they are the forefront of adopting other blogging/social media and networking tools but don’t in large numbers consider themselves as a blogger. i don’t know if that makes any sense.
To me people are incredibly interested in consuming and participating the wider blogosphere and especially in the microsphere of their interests or friends but the mid-range country wide level needs interest to be spurred by pushing content, services and tools that they need even though they don’t yet know they need it. But to get something more substantial happening I need funds but to get funds I need something more substantial. it’s a vicious little circle. Though the recent podcast between Duncan Riley and Ben Barren showed me the Gnoos/Feed Corp business model and how they earn their revenue by developing blog solutions for corporates and enterprise systems using their search index but not $$$ through their search facility.
I have always been open to ideas as well as help and the more I read and discuss with people the topic the better understanding I have of what needs to be done which is why I’m looking forward to the blogging conference tomorrow to listen and discuss ideas with others on what can be done better.
[…] Tsiamis’ latest post points to a link that shows the US based Google owned Blogger service is hosting 142,000 Australian […]
Hi Martin
You know me – I like my numbers!
The space is a little fragmented, and I don’t want to play favourites because there’s a lot of time and energy that’s gone into each site.
Directory – great for browsing & getting an overall feel for the blog.
Search – great for getting relevant local results.
Having tags or classification makes the directory much more relevant (and as you’ve pointed out my top 100 list is pretty eclectic – could do with categorisation).
Seems that it boils down to Aussie bloggers taking the initiative in putting their hand up and saying “I’m an Aussie. I blog. How can I be counted?”.
Are we really that slack, disinterested in networking, focussed globally? I dunno.
**************
Hey Anthony
Mate, it’s a heck of a job to be doing for very little “food money”.
“but I have only tagged less than a 1/3” – Any chance you could get that into a form and urge people to tag their own sites? Or is that fraught with danger (ie compromising the tagging integrity) and apathy?
Tagging over 3000 blogs would have to be a huge job. I only list 100 and haven’t gotten around to it yet…
I do understand what you’re saying. In defence of the Facebook community (that Bryce started), it is less than a couple of weeks old and really hasn’t received any promo (and up to 88 members already). Re Bumpzee – it’s a shame it’s an overseas community and not a freestanding Oz community, not that it would necessarily make any difference.
Perhaps there’s a bit of a stigma with such communities, whereby some established bloggers feel that it somehow cheapens what they do by networking? Or that they’ve got a core group of blogs that they read and are not really interested in new material unless it bites them in the butt?
I did listen to 3/4 of that interview – but got called away & didn’t get back to it. It’s a tough space to eke out an existence – especially at the micro level.
I really wish I could have made it to the conference, but look forward to all the coverage. I hope you get some great ideas.
I think there might be a bit of confusion with the numbers of blogs listed with Blogger. The listings you have are just for the bloggers who have put Australia in for their location on their profile.
It’s not an exact science to get the actual number of blogs that are Australian which are hosted by Blogger since there are quite a few people in that list (now at approximately 143,000) who have no blogs listed, and a lot of others who have multiple blogs listed.
Nevertheless, it’d be a great accomplishment if someone could get an accurate count on the number of Aussie blogs out there.
Sephyroth
http://www.sephyroth.net
Sephyroth
Ah yes, you do have a point. It is possible to have a profile without a listing a blog and one profile listing with many blogs. And probably many of those blogs are abandoned…. Still it is a very, very rough guide.
It would be good to have an accurate count
Hi Meg, another great post – keep the Aussie stuff coming!
In reply to Anthony – I’m glad you took the time to post up your thoughts there and, boy, can I relate to what your saying.
Just like I have to keep reminding myself, hang in there – I truly feel that local scene will come on strong. Years ago all the action was in a global scope but in the last twelve months especially the localised or geo relevant consumption just seems to be on a escalator along with the creation of services and content that is local in nature – and activity breeds activity!
It’s also worth a note that all the big international sites that put stars in peoples eyes started somewhere, probably in a similar position, it’s taken most them 3-4 years to get to where they are today!
hi,
if you’re interested, i’ve got a list of 145,793 Australian Blogger blogs at
http://theaustralianindex.com/?s=blogger
you can view the list for all states, or view the list by state. it’s difficult to tell how accurate a representation this list is of Australian Blogger blogs as it includes inactive blogs and does not include Australian blogs where the the author hasn’t set their location as Australia.