Maybe it's time for Blogspotting to change it's name. In the Newsweek online column of that title, Heather Green takes a closer look at numbers provided by Dave Sifry at Technorati. The numbers, first reported early this month in Sifry's State of the Live Web, suggest that the practice of blogging has plateaued.
Picking up threads from Matthew Hurst and Steve Rubel, Green emphasizes active posting, not the sheer number of blogs, as the best measure of the blogosphere's health. Technorati's threshold for counting a blog as active isn't a high one-at least one post within 90 days. According to numbers provided to Green, the number of active blogs tracked by Technorati is around 15.5 million. The total number of blogs is 70 million. So only 22% of blogs are active ones.
We already calculated back at the beginning of the month that the rate of daily blog posting per blog has declined slightly- from 2.3% in October to 2.1% at the end of March 2007. Green finds that the percentage of blogs that are active has also been declining from 36.7% in May 2006 to 20.9% in March 2007.
And, interestingly, the English language blogosphere in particular is shrinking. In October 2006 39% of blog posts were in English. In March 2007 only 33% were.
In other words, in October 2006, 39% of blog posts were in English. In March 2007, only 33% were in in English.
Sony Shares: The videosharing battle between GooTube and big media is getting a new competitor. Tomorrow Sony will launch a video sharing site. The unnamed site will be Japanese only, but Sony has said that it will decided about an overseas launch schedule based the Japanese experience. Last August Sony spent $65 million to acquire video-sharing site Grouper. It's unclear if Grouper technology will power Sony's new effort.
More social media acquisitions: TheStreet.com has purchased the remaining 50.1% of socially-enabled, and vowelly-challenged financial advice site Stockpickr; and NBC has purchased Rmail, a service provider that integrates RSS feeds into email. Terms of neither deal were announced.
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