Some stats
Gordon asked in the comments to this post about how we know that the USA has proportionally more bloggers than the UK. I didn't have time to share it just then, but I did actually look up some stats before I wrote that post. Obviously, no-one has done a proper survey of bloggers, so we're relying on totally incomplete info. Even the blog hosting services don't have stats by country. But the best reference I found was here at BlogHerald, and also here at Blogcount, a blog on, erm, counting blogs.
But, lets just look proportionally. On Blogwise today the USA has 27,310 blogs to the UK's 4,062.
On Livejournal today the USA has 3,608,675 to the UK's 199,598
Here a poll found that around 2% of Americans had a blog. That would be around 4.4 million blogs - and that was a few months ago. Technorati says that the blogosphere (arrgh, horrid word) is doubling every five months.
That would mean 4% of the American population blogging. Even if Blogherald's anecdotal 700,000 British bloggers is only half of the real number, that is still only 2.3% of our population. That is fairly consistent with the Blogwise stats of 0.012% of Americans vs 0.006% of Brits. The Livejournal stats of 1.6% of Americans vs. 0.33% of Brits show a much dimmer picture of UK blogging.
So we have at most half the number of bloggers, proportionally, that the USA does. And that's not even going into Blogherald's countup that there are really 36.2 million bloggers in the Anglosphere - even if you take out very generous numbers for Canada, the UK, Australia and the many non-Anglophonic bloggers who use US-based hosting services as well as spam blogs and inactive blogs - lets say we even take out half that number - well, the USA by that count would have 8% of its population blogging.
But yes, we need better stats. (and I'm really geeky for having spent this much time looking up this stuff!)
Gordon asked in the comments to this post about how we know that the USA has proportionally more bloggers than the UK. I didn't have time to share it just then, but I did actually look up some stats before I wrote that post. Obviously, no-one has done a proper survey of bloggers, so we're relying on totally incomplete info. Even the blog hosting services don't have stats by country. But the best reference I found was here at BlogHerald, and also here at Blogcount, a blog on, erm, counting blogs.
But, lets just look proportionally. On Blogwise today the USA has 27,310 blogs to the UK's 4,062.
On Livejournal today the USA has 3,608,675 to the UK's 199,598
Here a poll found that around 2% of Americans had a blog. That would be around 4.4 million blogs - and that was a few months ago. Technorati says that the blogosphere (arrgh, horrid word) is doubling every five months.
That would mean 4% of the American population blogging. Even if Blogherald's anecdotal 700,000 British bloggers is only half of the real number, that is still only 2.3% of our population. That is fairly consistent with the Blogwise stats of 0.012% of Americans vs 0.006% of Brits. The Livejournal stats of 1.6% of Americans vs. 0.33% of Brits show a much dimmer picture of UK blogging.
So we have at most half the number of bloggers, proportionally, that the USA does. And that's not even going into Blogherald's countup that there are really 36.2 million bloggers in the Anglosphere - even if you take out very generous numbers for Canada, the UK, Australia and the many non-Anglophonic bloggers who use US-based hosting services as well as spam blogs and inactive blogs - lets say we even take out half that number - well, the USA by that count would have 8% of its population blogging.
But yes, we need better stats. (and I'm really geeky for having spent this much time looking up this stuff!)
Comments
I think the biggest factor is the whole "UK using US domain/blog tools" thing. But I agree we're way behind the US when it comes to blogging, both in numbers and maturity.