Dear Mr. McFedries,

I enjoyed your article, 'Blah, Blah, Blog' in the recent IEEE Spectrum, but I was wondering where you got your weblog numbers from.

From my survey of the weblogs on offer and the stats generated on weblogs.com, I can only see a community of roughly 40,000 active webloggers, at most. Of this, only a small fraction get traffic.

It appears to be a far smaller community than weblogging companies would like to publicise. In any case, I am interesting in where your statistics came from. You could be closer to the truth than my statistical survey.

Best regards,

Tom Barbalet...

Hi Tom,

The Perseus survey results can be found here:

http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/thebloggingiceberg.html

All the best.

Paul McFedries

http://www.mcfedries.com/
http://www.wordspy.com/

Thanks Paul,

> The Perseus survey results can be found here:
> http://www.perseus.com/blogsurvey/thebloggingiceberg.html

Hmmm... it's not really clear how they moved from their small survey number to the predicted number of weblogs. The language of the document and its origin appears to show a clear bias in favour of the weblog companies. There is a wellcharted decline in weblogs, noted by the authors, which the Forecast section of the document seems to ignore.

My stats checks from weblogs.com shows an absolute maximum of about 24,000 active daily webloggers. Probably closer to 14,000 actual daily webloggers, and a maximum community of occasional updaters around 40,000. The number of daily updaters is also polluted by those who update 2+ times per day. In the past six months, whilst I have watched these numbers, I have seen a gradual decline in daily updaters.

It would be nice to have actual numbers. Particularly traffic numbers.

Thanks anyway for your article and email. I understand it wasn't actually about the numbers.

Best regards,

Tom Barbalet...