This article is quite timely and informative for anyone who still thinks blogging, especially international blogging, is still unimportant. Technorati, the best service for tracking blog traffic and searching tagged blogs, has some revealing data about who is blogging around the world. I wanted to copy and paste the entire article here, and show it to everyone, but the following paragraph and summary points are a good start to show you what it is about.

Something that may come as a surprise (at least to the English-speaking world) is that English isn't the biggest language of the blogosphere. In fact, English isn't even the primary language of one third of all posts that Technorati tracks anymore. Another interesting finding is that the Chinese blogosphere, which grew significantly in 2004 and 2005 (launches of MSN Spaces in Chinese, Bokee.com saw a peak of 25% of all posts in Chinese in November 2005) seems to be slowing down somewhat this year.

The blogosphere is multilingual, and deeply international

English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts in April 2006.

Japanese and Chinese language blogging has grown significantly.

Chinese language blogging, while continuing to grow on an absolute basis, has begun to decline as an overall percentage of the posts that Technorati tracks over the last 6 months

Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and German are the languages with the greatest number of posts tracked by Technorati.

Tags: blogging | Technorati | international