Technorati tracks more than 57 million blogs using proprietary algorithm software. The company began tracking blogs in late 2002, serves as a registry for the online journals, indexing and ranking them for professional and personal bloggers alike.
Technorati’s tracking algorithm has matured to reject the majority of spam blogs or “splogs,” blogs that just function as link farms or ads and frustrate users when they are returned as results in keyword searches.
Technorati founder Dave Sifry noted that the number of daily indexed blogs has dropped by 60,000 from his last “State of the Blogosphere” report because of a more sophisticated indexing mechanism.
“While last quarter I reported about 8 percent of new blogs that get past our filters and make it into the index are splogs, I’m happy to report that that number is now more like 4 percent,” Sifry wrote. “My gut feeling is that since we’re better at dealing with Spam now.”
One interesting trend that Technorati picked up on was a dramatic spike in posting after major political news. The service recorded a considerable spike in postings when Israel and Hezbollah were engaged in a military conflict.
Sifry expects a similar bump in his next quarterly report to reflect the flurry of blogging activity during midterm elections.
Sifry’s study also delves into the globalization of blogging. While English remains the top blogging language with Japanese as a close second, Chinese maintains the third spot but has lost ground. Farsi is new to the top 10, bumping Dutch off the list.
