David Sifry reported the latest statistics for global blogosphere in April, 2007. He has announced the collection result based on Technorati in every quarter. In this report, the top language of blog posts was japanese.
In terms of blog posts by language, Japanese retakes the top spot from our last report, with 37% (up from 33%) of the posts followed closely by English at 36% (down from 39%). Additionally there was movement in the middle of the top 10 languages, highlighted by Italian overtaking Spanish for the number four spot.
It seems as if japanese is the top of blogosphere in the world. According to another reports of Edelman, blogging is stronger in the Asia than in the Unite States and Europe.
Although most of japanese have blogs and there are many posts from japan, it seems a kind of Technorati bias. You can see only one localization site, Technorati Japan.
Because the statistics is based on the sum of ping registered by blogs, it’s very important the number of registered blogs. Technorati Japan was well known to Many of japanese bloggers, in fact, most of them usually used it because there is no meta-blog site such as Allblog.net in Korea.
Especially there is the Blog.tv, live talk show about blogosphere that is on the air by Tokyo MXTV. It consists on the introduction of recent videos from Youtube, internet news and interview of power bloggers. It was sponsored by Technorati Japan and all studio was covered by its logo. In my japan trip, I saw a book for blog that explains customizing skills of all blog services such as Moveble Type, Hatena Diary and Exceite Blog.
In contrast, there is rare blogs to ping Technorati.com although many of korean has own blog. The number of blogs in Naver is known over 7 millions with RSS and trackback and the number of active bloggers is over 0.3 million. General people don’t tend to use their blog without registering meta-blog sites.
Of course I think there are many japanese bloggers, but it seems cultural facts to follow the fashion from abroad and rapid assimilative localization power at the same time.
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April 15th, 2007 at 8:23 pm
Dear Channy Yun,
is it possible to ping Allblog with a blog software like Wordpress? Are there other such services besides Allblog and Eolin which I could ping to promote a Korean-language blog it in the korean blogosphere/market/search engines? E.g. can I ping Naver, Daum, …?
Thanks
Flo
April 15th, 2007 at 9:14 pm
Florian, Allblog is similar with Technorati. It must be registered to ping to that. (But, it was available ping.allblog.net in past.) Eolin can get pings from tattertools such as Tistory, ohmynews. Recent Naver and Daum made a strategic partnership with Allblog, so if you registered in allblog, your blog was indexed and search-able in Daum and Naver.
April 16th, 2007 at 3:37 am
Joi Ito is on the board of directors for Technorati I think. Blame Joi.
A lot of Japanese blogs are really dull, but these stats don’t make a lot of sense. Chinese should kick ass on every language eventually. One of my favourite Chinese statistics is; there are more people studying English in China now, then currently speak English in the entire world.
Chinese people love to blog, they seem to use MSN Spaces a lot. What software you use has a huge effect on how popular your blog is. I think the best thing you can do is set up your own domain using WordPress or something similar, but using WordPress.com or Blogger.com seems to help in the search engines a bit. I remember when Vox.com came out, Kevin Burton in particular thought it was going to dominate both blogging and online social networking. So far it hasn’t. I don’t read that many blogs, but I come across them in Google and I don’t recall the last time I read a blog on Vox.
I tend to stick to the English blogosphere. My Chinese is poor, my Japanese keeps getting worse, but sometimes I muddle through an email or a webpage. Maybe I’ll soon be studying Korean, my life is unsettled and confusing.
English due to the results of the second world war and American unwillingness to be more multi-cultural is now the dominant language in business, science, and deplomacy. Prior to the two world wars, French was the langauge of deplomacy, latin and German for sciences, and in business you were expected to speak multiple languages. The British Empire spread English far and wide, but French, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Portugese were also spread far and wide.
The languages currently popular correspond to the two largest economies. Perhaps financially well off people have the means and time to blog where as the poor and those on the opposite side of the digital divide do not. The Japanese population is shrinking and although many people do study Japanese to do business with them, China will eclipse them in the blogosphere due to the masses of people who speak Chinese. English, Spanish, Portugese, and French might have a chance due to their colonial past, but Japanese will not dominate technorati statistics once their system expands further. I think this abnomally is sampling bias error.
April 16th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
@Channy Yun
Thanks for the information.
@Muskie
Right, for Google search records the “Domain Popularity/Trust” has a big effect for the rankings. My german-language blog is quite well ranked and most of my (german) visitors come via google, since it is famous there. But many Koreans on the other hand prefer Naver, Daum, etc. for their searches. If I decide to do the efford to make an additional korean language blog (even though my korean is still poor, but I have lots of picture material about travel in korea) I should try to promote it probably in the Korean search engines so that the peope will find it and maybe even click on the adsense
April 19th, 2007 at 2:51 pm
I always thought that these numbers were biaisied because japanese have a different conception of blogging, probably closer to Twitter than to blogger.com, mostly because they are moblogging a lot (=more frequent, less content intensive posts).
It would be interesting to get other stats, like the average number of characters per post for all these languages.
April 26th, 2007 at 5:54 pm
Technorati mostly crawls Western blogs, and the result is biased for this very reason. Movable Type could start in Japan thanks to Joi Ito/Neoteny, and is therefore over-represented.
Now there are millions of blogs in China, and 30% of Korea has a Cyworld hompy which should qualify as blog, but they started before RSS was invented…
Also, Western style of blogging is more “intellectual” (cf. blogger) while Asians are more “emotional” (cf. Cyworld in Korea - not the US stripped-downd version - where people talk mostly to their real offline friends vs. MySpace where people talk to anonymous visitors and try to look good.). From our work with both Asian and Western online community services, we came to think that it had more to do with the blogging system and its open/closedness, as well as users’ maturity with blogging than with cultural factors.
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