Numbers, numbers and more numbers – online stats, blogging stats, twitter stats, reading stats, etcetera

Although we may not always recognise our bondage, we live, in modern times, under a tyranny of numbers –
(paraphrasing) Nicholas Eberstadt

Numbers are appealing. They equate to fact and accuracy; they help us to interpret the world and its workings. We can dispute the significance of numbers but we can’t dispute they exist, nor that they possess meaning.

There was some discussion last week regarding the contentiousness of ‘the number of blogs in the world’ estimate. The figure I quoted (borrowed from Nigel Featherstone) was 112 million. So what, asked Nicko the commenter, I’d rather know how many are actually still active. (Paraphrasing again.) John Weldon offered suggestions as to where to begin tracking down these numbers, so off I went, like a diligent researcher.

I rapidly learned, however, that measuring the web – for content and users – is considered somewhat controversial and inexact due to the dynamic nature of the medium. One of the central points of contention appears to be terminology. Countless businesses and organisations are collecting data on the internet, its uses and its users but everyone is running with different working definitions. When we talk about websites, are we taking about the numbers of registered domain users (easier) or actual web pages and links (more difficult)?

According to Whois domain tools, as of yesterday there are 118,098,965 domains active – in the US. Numbers for Australian websites, and how frequently they’re updating, are harder to come by.

Technorati (yes, combining ‘technology’ and ‘literati’) is an internet blog search engine that was ‘indexing 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media’ back in 2008 – revealing the source of the 112 million figure proffered at technology stat-worthy occasions.

BlogScope, on the other hand, is a project developed by the University of Toronto to analyse and visualise the blogosphere. BlogScope currently tracks 46.27 million English-content blogs, with 1307 million posts.

BlogScope can assist the user in discovering interesting information from these millions of blogs via a set of numerous unique features including popularity curves, identification of information bursts, related terms, and geographical search.

That is how I discovered that frogs and turtles are similarly weighted when it comes to the interests of blog writers over the course of 2010 as demonstrated below (though turtles did experience a spike in early February):

Technorati have been producing State of the Blogosphere reports since 2004. The extensive 2009 report will take to some time to sift through (involving a plethora of videos and graphs), but a quick read-through offered the following attention-drawing statistics.

Stats on blogging

15% of bloggers spend 10 hours or more a week blogging. The number of hours increases considerably if the person is self-employed, or a professional – 34% of self-employed people blog more than 10 hours per week.

85% of bloggers are using tags, thus improving searchability and accessibility of their blogs. The most popular tags were broad categories:

• politics
• blogging
• video
• writing and poetry
• technology
• books
• art
• photography

When asked what fields participants thought blogging had had the greatest impact on, 57% responded ‘politics’:

51% of participants believe this impact on politics will continue, while 30% believe, in the future, blogging will have the most impact on technology.

Stats on Twitter

Interestingly, more bloggers and writers are on Twitter than the general population. A 2009 survey for WSJ revealed that 14% of the US population used Twitter compared to 73% of participants in Technorati’s survey.

Most said they use Twitter to promote their blogs and businesses.

26% said Twitter had ‘eaten into the time they spend updating their traditional blogs’.

Technorati reports, via Lijit stats, that for blogs with more than 100 page views a day, 83% of their referrals were via Twitter.

Some other internet usage statistics you may find curious

According to a 2009 Nielsen Online Internet and Technology Report, the average Australian spends 80% of their waking hours consuming media – 89.2 hours a week. Last year was the first year Australians spent more time online than watching television (which is not to say that they weren’t watching television online.) Australians spend more time on social networking than any other comparable country.

12% of all websites are pornographic, as are 25% of all search engine requests. ‘Sex’ is the most searched word on the internet and every second, 28 258 internet users are viewing pornography. But most shocking of all? 70% of internet porn traffic occurs during work hours (stats courtesy of this ‘adult video’ on internet pornography statistics).

‘The purpose of computation is insight, not numbers’, said 
Richard Hamming, mathematician. As BlogScope posits:

Without a doubt, blogging is a social phenomenon. This trend will persist and grow as our lives become more heavily dependent on internet technologies.

It seems impossible to predict how we will produce content over the next few years when the data remains uncounted and definitions shift. Given the growth in online opinion and citizen journalism, surely the blogosphere will continue to expand, rather than contract?