Random Bytes...by Ross Rader

Tuesday, February 8

[12:39PM EST]

Bob Wyman: “ the number of blogs we monitor at PubSub.com passed over 8 million.”

PubSub is claiming that they’ve got the biggest searchable index of weblogs. Good for them. I’m more interested in the quality of the output, and here, Bob and the Gang get top marks. I use all the services, but for different purposes. For sheer volume, PubSub can’t be beat.

But there’s another gem in Bob’s note. He reasons that if they’ve managed to index 8 million weblogs in one year, that the total universe of weblogs must vastly exceed the universe of 10 million that seems to have emanated first from the Perseus weblog survey.

Sea of people “That would put the minimum blog census at 16 million while there are probably more than 24 million blogs. Personally, I would bet on the higher number.”

I’ve always had a problem with the Perseus data because it leaves out vast chunks of the blogosphere. For instance, it doesn’t count hosted weblogs like those running on MovableType or Wordpress. But is the gap this big? 24 million is an awfully huge number.

Here’s the rest of his analysis;

“The many pundits, journalists, etc. that have recently claimed that there are only 10 million blogs are clearly underestimating. At PubSub, we are very well aware that even though we've managed to find and monitor 8 million blogs during the year that we've been providing our service, there are many more blogs that we haven't located and some that we haven't tried very hard to find... For instance, we don't handle Chinese, Japanese and Korean very well at present and thus haven't made much of an effort to track down the many millions of blogs that use those character sets. It should also be noted that we only monitor blogs that have RSS or Atom feeds and we can't monitor "private" blogs that don't publish their feeds or that require authorization to read their feeds. Even with these limitations (to be addressed in the future) all indications are that the rate at which we discover new blogs is not slowing. Thus, I'm very confident that there must be at least two to three times as many blogs then those we've already discovered. That would put the minimum blog census at 16 million while there are probably more than 24 million blogs. Personally, I would bet on the higher number.”

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[12:03AM EST] Backstaging.com : "Paul Chavez recently wrote inquiring what type of gear I use to put 5:15 together. Coincidentally, I had just finished laying down a walking tour of my neighborhood that mostly ended up being a tour of my mobile podcasting rig. I took the opportunity to edit it down from the original 2 hours of footage that I'd recorded (saving a ton of juicy bits for future episodes of 5:15) and render it down to a fairly succinct 28:31."

Doc Searls always said he prefers to answer his email in public - presumably because it means that you would only ever have to answer individual questions once each. In that spirit, I recently took the opportunity to answer some questions that were being sent my way about 5:15 as well as get my ball rolling over at Backstaging.com.
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