A Consuming Experience

Thoughts on my experiences as a consumer of products, services, people (well maybe not that last one...), from reviews to raves, rants and random thoughts - concentrating on technology, gadgets, software, product usability, consumer issues, customer service. Including some introductory guides and tips on various subjects (like blogging!) which stumped me until I figured them out. And the occasional ever so slightly naughty observation.

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Blogger, MSN etc: which blogging system's most popular?

Wednesday, March 15, 2006
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Which blogging platforms are currently the most popular? What percentage of bloggers use which system? There don't seem to be many recent surveys or stats trying to measure the comparative popularity or usage of the different blogging systems, though perhaps I've just missed them.

Recently I found a paper, SVMs for the Blogosphere: Blog Identification and Splog Detection by Pranam Kolari, Tim Finin and Anupam Joshi, on the identification of blogs and how to distinguish them from non-blogs - not necessarily as easy as it might sound especially if you're trying to automate the process and have software rather than humans do it.

It concentrated on the detection of spam blogs, but part of it dealt with how (as part of their research) they identified blogs hosted on what they found were the most used blogging software or blogging services: Blogger's Blogspot, Microsoft's MSN and the like (mainly for the purpose of then excluding those blogs from their study). They carried out this analysis based on the websites returned from random searches on leading blogosphere search engine Technorati, from which they collected about half a million "live" blog home pages. The study was conducted in in May to August 2005 and the paper is copyright 2006, so the data seems relatively up to date. They also regularly monitored Weblogs.com for data on blog updates, to confirm that the Technorati data was indeed a good sampling of the blogosphere, and the results from the about 5 million blog home pages they collected in this way generally matched in the relative order of blog hosting popularity though not in their exact position.

Based on the Technorati queries part of their study, it seems that the most commonly-used blogging platforms are:

blogspot 44%
msn 23%
livejournal 8%
aol 1%
splinder 1%
20six 1%
typepad 1%
blog 1%
fc2 1%
hatena 1%

Note that the method used in the SVMs paper only looks at the relative number of blog hosts, gleaned from the domain names, rather than blogging software. A lot of Blogger users publish to their own domains/servers instead of using Blogspot.com, and similarly many Wordpress and Movable Type etc users have their own domains, so just going by the domain name will leave those users out of the equation. However, I still think it's useful as a rough guide. Certainly, these results reassure me that if I want to keep producing posts which are helpful to the most number of bloggers, then continuing to focus mainly on Blogger is fine as clearly Blogger still has the biggest user base.

I also found an analysis by Elise Bauer carried out back in February 2005, where she looked at how many sites Google reported as linking to sites on Blogspot.com, Livejournal.com etc, what she called "Google Share". It's obviously out of date now, but still useful as a comparison. Again, it looks only at the domain names, so the same caveats apply.

In February 2005, according to this method, the top two weblog tools were Blogger and Live Journal, with (quite some way behind) Diaryland next. So it's clear that MSN has taken over Livejournal's no. 2 spot in the blogosphere, in just a few months (remember, the SVMs study ended in August 2005). It would certainly be interesting to compare the results if she carries out a similar analysis again soon.

I'd love to see more accurate statistics, though, pulled out just for the purpose of analysing the relative "market share" of the various blogging systems (looking at meta "generator" tags of blogs, for instance, which would be a more acccurate way of identifying the blogging software used than looking at their domains). It would be very interesting to track the changes in the comparative popularity of the different blogging platforms over time, and see if there are any broad trends.

Someone with more expertise than me should be able to employ Technorati's API to dig out that kind of information - perhaps Technorati CEO David Sifry could include this sort of data in a future edition of his authoritative "state of the blogosphere" updates?


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5 Comment(s):

well, after the recent blog awards we can clearly state that blogger is still the #1 blogging tool considering it won again and not only that, a huge lot of blogpost blogs were big winners in it.

i have always found this very funny considering that even if blogger is as easy as wordpress.com to start a blog, blogpost continues to be ultra hardcore in the matter of customizing your blog account to suit your needs.

(By Craffter, at Thursday, March 16, 2006 11:37:00 PM)  Edit Comment

oh, and about market share, the last time i also were searching for that info rmation (a year ago) i found that according to a some A guy, blogger still owned over 60% of the marketshare...

even if this has been reduced i doubt i would be less that 50%, that is amazing considering there 10 other worth to mention blog platforms.

That must be true imp, just think about,if there blogger didn´t had that supremacy you think they would be so slow to update?.

don´t think so.

(By Craffter, at Thursday, March 16, 2006 11:45:00 PM)  Edit Comment

The way blogger is performing at the moment it could be soon behind the chalkboard in ways to publish on the web. Love this site by the way - keep up the great work!

(By mp3hugger, at Sunday, March 19, 2006 10:28:00 AM)  Edit Comment

Thank you for this great stats update.

I have cited you @ "What's a blog - WYSIWYG."

(By Mohamed Taher, at Thursday, March 23, 2006 7:29:00 AM)  Edit Comment

Thank you all for your interesting comments (sorry, I'm very behind on replying to comments at the mo!)

Craffter - you're probably right about why Blogger don't improve their system by adding categories, etc - they don't need to in order to get customers.

mp3hugger - was your blog on the troublesome server that Blogger have had to do all sorts of things to? I've not had too many problems myself, luckily, though I've not been posting much these last few weeks. And I'm glad you like my site, thanks for the feedback! (Love your name, by the way. Mean to check out your blog as soon as I can.)

Dr Mohamed - you're welcome, and thank you for the link.

(By Improbulus, at Friday, March 24, 2006 9:24:00 AM)  Edit Comment

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