I’ve been nagging about the lack of interest for blogging in Sweden. Now Dave Sifry of Technorati has some stats that might get a few local trend watchers up and running. Apparently the blogosphere doubles every five months and Technorati now tracks 4 million blogs. That figure was 3 million just three months ago. Ignore at your own peril. (Via Corporate Engagement).
In another post today, Sifry examines the relationship between blogs and big media in terms of inbound links. Big media sites are on top but “a large number of people are getting news, information, and opinion from outside of the mainstream media, and … these sources are rivaling or exceeding the attention paid to smaller “professional” sites”.
In Sifry’s chart, the top five web sites ranked by number of inbound links are still traditional media web sites (www.nytimes.com as #1). But 20 of the top 40 are blogs, which shows how blogs are eating into big media’s business concept of delivering consumer attention to its advertisers. If blogs are already this influential it can only mean that we are witnessing a transformation of considerable ad spending from big media to blogs. It may not yet have happened but ad money goes where eyeballs go, that’s just the way it is.
Sifry also writes that there are approximately 8000 blogs that have between 100-1000 inbound sources and tens of thousands of blogs with between 50-100 inbound sources.