The blog [define] revolution is well underway, giving every Internet user the opportunity to become an online journalist. While it is difficult to calculate exactly how many individuals are using Web sites as journals, Blogcount estimates that there are roughly 2.4 million to 2.9 million active Weblogs as of June 2003.
Of this figure, Blogcount attributes more than 1.6 million active users to the top three centrally hosted services. Smaller hosts, intranet blogs, and standalone tools account for the remainder.
| How Many Blogs? | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Registered | Active | As of | |
| LiveJournal | 1,121,464 | 526,535 | June 2003 |
| Blogger | 1,500,000 | 705,000 | June 2003 |
| DiaryLand | 850,000 | 400,000 | March 2003 |
| TOTALS | 3,471,464 | 1,631,535 | |
| Note: Based on management reports | |||
| Source: Blogcount | |||
Of the 655,631 Weblogs currently indexed by the The National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITL) BlogCensus, the overwhelming majority are published in the English language.
| Top Blogging Languages | |
|---|---|
| Language | Count |
| English | 350097 |
| Portuguese | 54496 |
| Polish | 42677 |
| Farsi | 27002 |
| French | 10381 |
| Spanish | 9509 |
| German | 7736 |
| Italian | 7017 |
| Dutch | 3684 |
| Icelandic | 3542 |
| Source: NITL BlogCensus | |
Roughly 2 percent of the online community has created a blog, according to Jupiter Research (a unit of this site’s corporate parent). Interestingly, the majority (60 percent) of bloggers are dialing up to access their online journals, and more than half (57 percent) have a household income below $60,000 per year. Jupiter also found that blogging is split evenly among the genders, with most (70 percent) bloggers having an online tenure of more than 5 years.
While there may be several million blogs eating up bandwidth, Jupiter estimates that only 4 percent of the online community read them. The demographics of blog readers differ from those that create and publish to the sites — particularly in the gender and income categories.
Blogs seem to be read mostly by men (60 percent vs. 40 percent women), in homes where the total income is more than $60,000 per year (61 percent). Dial-up remains the connection of choice (54 percent compared to 46 percent broadband), and the majority (73 percent) of blog readers have been online for more than 5 years.