Idle Words' Weblog Crawl Report currently finds more than 460'000 blogs and gives very interesting statistics on language distribution (Altough Live Journal's 500'000 active journals are obviously missing). While it is not a surprise that english dominates, what makes up the other half of the blogosphere caught my interest: Obviously blogging is very popular in Brasil (more than 50'000), Poland (almost 40'000) and Iran (more than 20'000). Iceland features at least 3500 blogs with a population of just 160'000, so more than 2% are blogging there! Often, the driving factor seem to be popular hubs and blog posters like Blogger Brasil, blog.pl and Persian Blog. Via the interesting blogcount.
So, where is Switzerland?
Posted by seefeld at June 18, 2003 19:04Switzerland is in there - I actually crawled Swiss Blogs to get a good list. But since Switzerland doesn't have its own language, you won't find it in the list.
I contacted LiveJournal ages ago to ask them for a URL list, and I'm still waiting for a reply. I would love to get them in the system!
Thanks Maciej, for your comment.
Actually my question was more of the rhetorical sort, my impression being that there are still only very few blogs in Switzerland.
Maybe, an indicator could be the domain of the blog or the whois entry for blogs with their own domain? There are some systems like http://www.geourl.org/, http://www.blogchalking.com/ and FOAF which could give additional hints. The domain of the email address (if any is given on the blog) is a good signal, too. Obviously, none of this will give the coverage of language as an indicator, but I think that an analysis like this could still be very interesting!
Do you plan to make your list of blogs public?
Posted by: Bernhard Seefeld at June 18, 2003 07:31 PMThe issue of where a blogger is and who a blogger is raises all kinds of interesting questions about identity, nationality, and so on. There are a lot of expats out there.
I'm interested in working with the sites you mention to try and extract/deduce/guess geographical info. We've had a few exploratory email exchanges, and today I'm going to try and get them a reasonably full list of sites with GeoURL or FOAF entries.
As for the blog list, it is public! We're archiving a full snapshot every two weeks, and you can download the list in various configurations. Visit the Blog Census homepage and you'll find a download link.
Cheers!
-Maciej
Posted by: Maciej Ceglowski at June 18, 2003 07:37 PM