Tagging Takes Hold in Blogosphere, Social Media

The tagging index has seen explosive growth as a locator for Web content. That’s according to “The State of the Live Web, April 2007,” released by Technorati.

Tags, or descriptors attached to an article or piece of content on the Web as a means of indexing by category, are undergoing substantial growth. Tagging allows shared information to be both stored and searchable across blogs and other social media sites, including video and photo properties such as YouTube and Flickr.

The blogosphere continues to see doubling in volume, though due to the law of large numbers, doubling occurs at a slower rate. It recently took about 320 days to double from 35 million to 70 million blogs. In the past, the number of blogs grew from five million to 10 million in about 180 days.

Blog posting is growing only incrementally. Overall, posting volume is about 1.5 million postings per day, or roughly 17 posts per second. In October of last year, the blogosphere saw about 1.3 million postings per day, or 15 posts per second.

Japanese grew as the dominant language for posts on the blogoshpere with 37 percent of posts, up from 33 percent last quarter. English language posts account for 36 percent of the blogosphere. Farsi moved into the top 10 languages, joining Chinese, Italian, German, Portugese, French, and Spanish.

While blog hosting providers are addressing spam and splogs (define), occurrences continue to increase. On an average day, between 3,000 and 7,000 new splogs are created. A spike of over 11,000 splogs occurred every day last December, totaling 341,000, which Technorati removed from its index.

The “State of the Live Web” is a quarterly report previously published as “State of the Blogosphere.” It reports on trends in the blogosphere and social media as tracked by the Technorati index.