A new publication "Blogs pour les pros"

Les chapitres et extraits disponibles dans leur version préliminaire (avant relecture et corrections) sont:


-La fin du marketing tel que nous le connaissons
-Etes-vous sûr de réellement vouloir bloguer en public ?
-Partager l'information a infiniment plus de valeur que la protéger (ce chapitre a été revu en profondeur)
-Conseils de base pour écrire un bon blog "pro"
-Comment regrouper 250 personnes de 25 pays en un mois avec un blog et sans publicité

-Travailler en groupe sur une présentation européenne avec un blog et un wiki
-Blog de marques et de chefs d'entreprise
-Les blogs des salariés
-Générez des revenus avec votre blog
-Les blogs contre le journalisme

العالمية للمدونات دويتشه فيله -

.تم إختيار مدونة نسرين للفوز بجائزة أحسن مدونة عربية من بين الثمانية النهائيين

ممارسات فاحشة عبر الكاميرات

علاقات صداقة وحب وجنس في غرف الدردشة العربية

تدوين

تدوين هى احد مواقع شبكة الطحاوى لخدمات انترنت و التسويق و التجارة الالكترونية.
تهتم تدوين بعرض و ربط المدونات العربية و تقديم الدعم للمدونين العرب.
تدوين ممولة بالكامل من شبكة الطحاوى و مجموعة ناشرين مستقلة لا تهدف للربح.
تدوين لا تمنح افضلية فى دليل المدونات بمقابل مادى و المدونات المنشورة هى ملك لأصحابها.
تابع شروط الخدمة و اتفاقية الخصوصية.

[via Jankari.org]

A new publication on Blogs by a famous blogger

Blogs pour les pros est en cours d'impression, il sera en librairie fin Novembre et vous pouvez déjà le pré-commander en ligne. Merci à tous pour vos nombreux commentaires sur mes chapitres, ceux-ci m'ont permis de l'améliorer.

'Splogs' Roil Web, and Some Blame Google

Spam, long the scourge of email users, rapidly has become the bane of bloggers too.

Spammers have created millions of Web logs to promote everything from gambling Web sites to pornography. The spam blogs -- known as "splogs" -- often contain gibberish, and are full of links to other Web sites spammers are trying to promote. Because search engines like those of Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. base their rankings of Web sites, in part, on how many other Web sites link to them, the splogs can help artificially inflate a site's popularity. Some of the phony blogs also carry advertisements, which generate a few cents for the splog's owner each time they are clicked on.
[via Smart Mobs]

Social Networks and Social Networking

Social networking is built on the idea that there is a determinable structure to how people know each other, whether directly or indirectly. Notions such as "six degrees of separation" — that everyone on Earth is separated from everyone else by no more than six intermediate personal relationships — have popularized the idea that people can be (however unknowingly) connected through common associates.

This issue's theme includes three articles on research activities that have drawn on ideas from social networking to drive innovative designs. The focus stays close to our own intellectual home — the design, development, and study of social technologies at the level of individuals, groups, and organizations — although we refer to the broader issue of business, community, and societal impact in this short introduction.

We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People

Grassroots journalists are dismantling Big Media's monopoly on the news, transforming it from a lecture to a conversation. Not content to accept the news as reported, these readers-turned-reporters are publishing in real time to a worldwide audience via the Internet. The impact of their work is just beginning to be felt by professional journalists and the newsmakers they cover. In We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, nationally known business and technology columnist Dan Gillmor tells the story of this emerging phenomenon, and sheds light on this deep shift in how we make and consume the news.

read more

What Is Free Software

In This Article:

1. From Free to Proprietary
2. Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation
3. The Rise of Open Collaboration
4. Is It Free or Open Source?
5. The Future of Free Softwar

Blogging and the Wisdom of Crowds

One of the most highly touted features of the Web 2.0 era is the rise of blogging. Personal home pages have been around since the early days of the web, and the personal diary and daily opinion column around much longer than that, so just what is the fuss all about?

Kifaya movement in Kuwait

[via Sabbah’s Blog]

(AFP) Around 200 Kuwaiti soccer fans called for the resignation of Kuwait Football Association officials after the national team’s poor form during their World Cup qualifying games.

The protestors, standing outside the KFA offices, raised placards calling on members of the ruling al-Sabah family to stay away from the football federation and for holding officials accountable for the team’s debacle.

“Kefaya” or “enough”, one of the placards read. (in fact that one is saying: “Keep the ruling family away from sports”)

The president and the head of training at the KFA are members of the ruling al-Sabah family.

A new Kifaya Movemeent in Tunesia: Yessi Movement

"Ben Ali, Fock!", "Ben Ali, Yezzi!"



Literally it means "Ben Ali, enough is enough!"(*) This expression in Tunisian dialect intends to transmit a clear message to the dictator in order to give up power, because we consider it is "enough". For us Tunisians, who are always banned from freely reaching independent information and who are violently forbidden from any peaceful demonstration; this kind of demonstration is a new form of peaceful protest,(See the site www.yezzi.org)

We call all of those who adhere to this discontent to join this demonstration, and send their photographs indicating one of the slogans mentioned above or carrying their own heartfelt one, to the following address: manif@yezzi.org


We call all Tunisian websites and blogs to defend freedom of expression on Internet and to resist governmental projects aiming to "regulate" the network by joining the "Blue Ribbon" campaign for freedom of expression and thus by inserting the "Blue Ribbon" logo on their Web pages (see the website of the TAPD - Cyberspace)

(*) It should be noted that the Tunisian expression "Fock" does not have any relationship with the English expression different by one letter.

حرية التعبير في حداد

A blog on the mourning of the Freedom of expression in Tunesia

State of the Blogosphere, October 2005 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth

State of the Blogosphere, October 2005 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth
Posted by Dave SifryDave Sifry on October 17, 2005. Tags: Technorati News

It is that time of the year again, and I've got some new information on the continued growth of the blogosphere. I made this presentation as part of my 10 minute talk at Web 2.0 on October 6, 2005. You can download the entire presentation, complete with underlying data as well, for research use, or to make part of other presentations. All I ask is that you keep attribution and the Technorati logo in a prominent place wherever the data is used.

Earlier State of the Blogosphere reports are available as well - from August 2005, from March 2005, and from October 2004.
So, What's New?

Well, first, the basics. The chart below shows the continued growth of the blogosphere. Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs, and the total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months. This trend has been consistent for at least the last 36 months. In other words, the blogosphere has doubled at least 5 times in the last 3 years. Another way of looking at it is that the blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago:
Technorati weblogs growth over time

The next chart shows the number of new blogs tracked each day by Technorati. About 70,000 new weblogs are tracked every day, which is about a new weblog created each second, somewhere in the world. It also appears that blogging is taking off around the world, and not just in English. Some of the significant increases we've seen over the past 3 months have been due to a proliferation of chinese-speaking weblogs, both on MSN Spaces as well as on Chinese sites like blogcn.com.

Now that we've been tracking spam and fake blogs, we've included the daily tracking statistics for spam and fake blogs from June 1, 2005. We are currently tracking about 2% - 8% of new weblogs are fake or spam weblogs. They are represented as the red spikes that are over and above the legitimate (human-created and updated) blogs shown in blue below.
New Technorati blogs per day
Spam Attacks

In the last couple of days, there's been a lot of talk about a set of spam blogs that have been set up to do keyword stuffing using a lot of popular phrases, including many popular bloggers' names. Lots of people have discussed this, including Tim Bray, Dave Winer, Ed Cone, Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Jeff Jarvis, and others. In order to adequately analyze this, I updated the chart to include the blog data we've been tracking all the way up to yesterday, October 16, 2005.

In the past 2 weeks, there were 805,000 new weblogs created. In addition, Technorati tracked an additional 39,000 new fake and spam weblogs, which means that about 4.6% of the total weblogs tracked were fake or spam.

One of the remarkable things that comes out of looking at the data is that while spam and fake blogs are a problem, they are not an overwhelming problem - In fact, we've experienced much worse spam attacks in the past. The key difference in the spam attack over the weekend is that the attackers' posts included many popular search terms including popular bloggers' names - which is a common ego search on engines like Technorati. This made this particular attack much more visible to a number of high profile bloggers than attacks in the past.

A look at the posting volume over the last year is illustrative as well, and is included in the chart below:
Daily posting volume

You can see from the post statistics that there are on average, between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts made each day. That's about 33,000 posts per hour. Spam and fake posts are reported here as well, and on average an additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are spam or fake. This number changes on a daily basis as we track spam attacks, and have reached as high as an additional 18% over the regular daily volume.

One may argue that the numbers I'm reporting are way too low, or that Technorati isn't finding all of the spam weblogs out there. That's a legitimate argument, and by no means am I asserting that Technorati is capturing all of the spam and fake weblogs in existence. We know we're not getting them all, and every day we're working on improving our algorithms and data quality. However, our hard work means that we can still provide you with comprehensive timely results without having to do anything drastic, like removing a major hosting provider with millions of legitimate blogs from our indexes.

We're also working closely with the other players in the industry in order to close the gaps. In September, we helped organize the second Web 2.0 Spam summit, and representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Six Apart, Tucows, Wordpress, Feedster, and many more companies and organizations participated. The summit was quite successful, and I expect that there will be many more to come.
To summarize:

* As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 million weblogs
* The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
* The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
* About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
* About a new weblog is created each second
* 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
* Between 700,000 and 1.3 million posts are made each day
* About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
* An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average

What's Next?

Of course, one important question rears its head - how to make sense out of this monstrous onrush of conversation, and just get what you want - the best information from the most authoritative or influential people, in the most timely manner.

More on that in my next two posts, covering the growth of tags and of context in search and discovery

Haitham Sabbah in the Media; Blogging in the Arab World

The full interview:


[Q1. It’s a reality that Arab dissent is growing through blogs, the easiest and cheapest way to collect thoughts and people, and to avoid for a while regimes’ censorship. Tunisia seemed to me a sort of country of birth, but the river of information/communication through blogs was really spreading specially starting this year, between February and March, when Arab bloggers were observing with a lot of attention all the political activities allover the region. Not only the so called Cedar revolution in Lebanon, but were spreading information (pictures, also) about dissent in Cairo (Kefaya et alia), with a growing attention to referendum and police violence, electoral campaign in August and presidential elections; talking about Syria, Kuwait, Bahrain dissent; disseminating the net with artistic samizdat. Can you explain this phenomenon from your point of view?
A1. The phenomenon is a natural inclination of maturity that wanted to make a clear position of the humble citizens of Middle Eastern, by taking the responsibility to represent the truth as they live it and see it, not as the west received it from what the majority of the Arabian bloggers, a biased anti-Arab, anti-Islam media.

Of course, presenting the truth as they live it and see it is not necessary counted as pro local governments and regimes, and not necessary against them, but in most cases resulted that blogger try to achieve the following:

1. Have a new window to represent the Arab countries, from within its people.
2. Anonymous (as most of them think they are) blogger, where no one can question him or hold him accountable for what he claim against, or for the country he represent. In other words, this created an attraction for the blogger to be free to reveal as much of their identity as they choose, unlike the public media
3. Correcting, and in some cases introducing the point of view that you never see on western media
4. Open new channels of discussion with formal and non formal identities inside ones country as well as outside
5. Get attention and support from international media as well as NGO’s for cases that one day were impossible to cross the borders of the room or the country they toke place
6. Mobs organization and unofficial groups’ space for declarations that are not permitted by the local governments and societies they live in. An example of that could be gays, or religious extremist, both of which are rejected widely within the Arab society
7. The unlimited topics and means of presentation that defeats the old Arab media style, which unfortunately is not showing any tendency of developing towards representing the pulse of the citizens rather than the rules by which they have to live within as dictated by their governments
8. The commercial and out-of-culture entertainment media, which in all cases was and still is a copy of imported foreign values that do not represent the Arab culture in general, and the refusal to accept that as the face value of the moderate citizens, hence the Arab bloggers
9. The emergence of few organizations who have sprung up to protect and to fight for the human rights in these countries, encouraged to have an extension of activities through bloggers who in all too many countries, face clampdowns on their freedom of expression
10. Another attraction of blogs in Arab world is the feedback, with readers of blog entries able to post their comments directly to blogs, thus hearing the hidden local news as well the opposite point of view that will never have space or means to appear to the public
11. War blogs and bloggers as a tool. This is conceived by some Arab bloggers, specially the depressed ones who feel that they have no chance to fight the war against their enemy (whoever and whatever that enemy is) face to face, due to the external and internal boundaries that govern his society
12. At the same time the online technology for setting up blogs has become increasingly user friendly, and is free

Q2. Arab blogs are not only political. Which kind of social and cultural reality do they represent, or at least show to us? Are they a sort of would-be butterfly constraint inside her “prison” but quite ready to fly, or it’s a short-term net-phenomenon?
A2. Arab blogs are like all other blogs. Yes the age of Arab blogs is small when compared to the USA blogs for example, but we have to keep in mind the fact that the majority of The Arab blogger community is overwhelmingly youthful, with many of them being students or aged 20-40. Youth is one of the striking characteristics of bloggers in the Arab world. Whereas in the USA for example many bloggers are long-established journalists, commentators and political troublemakers, such personalities in the Arab world do not yet generally have blogs.

Maybe this is partly because younger people have fewer inhibitions about mixing their writing about politics with contributions on more personal matters. It seems as if there are more English than Arabic-language blogs, and in the Maghreb there are of course many French blogs.

Therefore, what they represent is what modern reality of their social and cultural life is. I don’t agree to describe them as being in prison and ready to fly, no, they are what they are. However, unfortunately this is not what the West perceives about the Middle East. Being it a matter of heritage or a result of biased media, westerns still think that Arabs means camels, tents and 1001 nights.
Q3. I saw a debate in the Arab blogosphere on the language. What’s the inner meaning of this debate. Is Arabic used also as a sort of ideological mean? English and French are only seen as a colonialistic heritage or represent something else? What do you think, finally, about the typical mix normally used by younger and educated Arab generations?
A3. I don’t believe that is true. Yes, most if not all the early Arab bloggers had no choice when they started but to use the English as their blog language. But as I said, there was no choice. Arabic blog engines and tools were not available then. But I also don’t blame them, the Arabic bloggers in considering this as a colonialistic heritage, specially that famous blog tools such as blogger.com does not by default support writing in Arabic, even they don’t list Palestine Territories in the list of countries as when one register for a new blog!

On the other hand, I believe English blogs of Arabic bloggers has different objective than those written in Arabic, and that is the reach to the west in most, and the first language of some for those who live outside the Arab world.
For decades, there were no open channels between the East and the West. Blogs was and still is a great opportunity for Arab with bilingual skills to reach other around the world. To start a process of “learning to unlearn” on the non-Arab mass, so that the old believes and values perceived about Arabs, their culture and society are corrected and/or updated, and to represent an alternative point of view than that presented by local and foreign official views. It is very essential mind opener tool.

At the same time, Arabic blogs are also essential tool for open discussion between Arabs. A tool that never existed before to share ideas, to form a position, and to organize a move. Arabs in general never got the chance to live a democratic life locally or regionally. Hence, I believe that Arabic blogs will also help transfer of knowledge and strategies directly and indirectly will help in the long run to empower the Mobs. The recent Egyptian elections, and the reaction of Arab blogger (Arabic and English) from Egypt and outside, is a good example although it might have not made a big difference on the Elections process, but I think will be more powerful next elections, not only in Egypt, but in all Arab countries.
Q4. If we speak about the age of civil and political bloggers, many of you are very young. Do you agree that the bloggers are the sons of Al Jazeera revolution? At least from 2000 Al Aqsa intifada, they are digesting information not through anachronistic national State television channels. Do you think that Al Jazeera and her tv sisters were the necessary food for these blogs to grow and spread? Do you think that this is their way to show that they are ready to use not-conformistic information through the communication channels they have? In a word, through Blogs? Is there anything Al Jazeera and her tv sisters taught to bloggers in the way they do also information?
A4. In fact I think the contrary is true. Al Jazeera has learned from Arab Bloggers and followsuited by opening their English website, which is a great success by the way to the Arabic media. In fact I guess this success encouraged them to take the decision to open the English TV channel of Al Jazeera, which should be live early next year as they claim.

On the other hand, and as was mentioned before, most of the bloggers are very young. And to tell you the truth, Al Jazeera is not so much famous TV channel between this generations. However, that maybe does not apply to the political bloggers, which are not by the way that young. But, did Al Jazeera revolution have an effect on Arab bloggers? Yes it had, and probably will continue to do, specially that most if not all Arabs see it as the first open-debate channel that touch on taboos, similar to what Arab bloggers do touch on.

Having said all that, sometimes one has the impression the young Arab bloggers cannot believe the attitude of the older generation and especially figures of authority locally and internationally. And these are often challenged on Al Jazeera, but do not represent the Arab bloggers views, which mean that it does not represent the mass educated and ignored young generation. In fact, I believe that young generation has no presentation in the Arab media “revolution”, except few, very few Arabic newspapers articles here and there, on the other hand, much more attention from the western media, and this interview is an example :-)
Period.
They were only four question, I answered in four pages :-)

Anyway, please feel free to answer above questions and add correct me if I’m wrong…

]

لتدوين بلا حدود.. العدد الثالث

عدد متاز

التدوين بلا حدود.. العدد الثالث

توضيح سريع قبل الانتهاء من كامل خدمات الموقع.. يهدف هذا الموقع إلى أن يكون ملتقى لكل المدونين العرب؛ مساحة للتلاقي وتبادل الخبرات. من خدمات الموقع:
- التدوين بلا حدود: هذا هو القسم المنتهي حاليا من الموقع، وهو عبارة عن مجلة أسبوعية تصدر مساء كل جمعة، لتقدم نخبة منتقاة من أهم وأبرز التدوينات العربية.
- دليل […]

Will lawmakers raise shields to protect bloggers?

A heads up for bloggers and other independent journalists on the status of shield laws and constitutional protections -- or lack thereof

The Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics

The results from the call for nominations are in and now we are asking you to select your favorite choice from the list of 20 finalists for the Top Ten Who Are Changing The World of Internet & Politics vote, sponsored by PoliticsOnline and the 6th annual E-Democracy Worldwide Forum.

This year marked the toughest year ever in choosing the 20 finalists. The integration of politics and the Internet has spread like wildfire around the globe, reflected in this year's diverse, international nominees.

The winners, those top 10 nominees who receive the most votes, will be announced at the 6th annual Worldwide Forum on Electronic Democracy -- September 28-29, in Issy-les-Moulineaux, (Paris, France).

Please review the 20 finalists below and then select one of the following as your choice for the Top Politics & Internet World Changer of 2005.

Arabic Blogs

Blog Directory Listings

One blog created 'every second'

The blogosphere is continuing to grow, with a weblog created every second, according to blog trackers Technorati.

Blogs vie with news for eyeballs

Bloggers are gaining a higher profile alongside traditional news sources with Yahoo including blogs in its expanding news search system.

Blooker rewards books from blogs

The best books based on blogs are to be recognised in their own literary prize.

Citizens do media for themselves

The Asian tsunami and the London terror attacks marked a turning point for the reporting of events.

Web enjoys year of biggest growth

The web has grown more in 2005 than it did at the height of the dotcom boom, says a study.

Web enjoys year of biggest growth

The web has grown more in 2005 than it did at the height of the dotcom boom, says a study.

The Blog Herald Blog Count October 2005: over 100 million blogs created

The Blog Herald Blog Count October 2005: over 100 million blogs created
Related entries in In the News

Its been three months since the last Blog Herald Blog Count due to the richness of the figures I’ve been collecting and the time its takes, but the Blog Count returns for October, and will now be published quarterly.

Now for the good stuff: the number of blogs in existence: over 100 million blogs

There are two sets of figures: based on major blog using countries the figure would be around 75 million, which is a patchy figure because its difficult to count blogs based on the country of origin due to the worldwide phenomenon of people using US companies. Based on blogs created at major hosts (a more accurate measure) the figure is actually 134-144 million. So I’m taking a round 100 million + blogs figure.

As always I’ll qualify that the Blog Count is about counting blogs, not active blogs, legitimate blogs (vs spam blogs) or bloggers. Are there a lot of inactive blogs? yes. Are there a lot of spam blogs? yes as well, indeed I’d suggest maybe 40-50% of every blog on Googles Blogspot domain is a spam blog, but the vast majority of blogs out there aren’t.

The history of this count: it started because I was tired of reading press reports that there were 4 or 5 million blogs out there when some countries had more than this alone. The figures still aren’t good in the press. In this last week I’ve read that there were 14 million blogs out there. Technorati is now nearly upto 20 million, but its still no where near the true number of blogs out there based on reported numbers. If SixApart alone counts 11 million users, then surely there are a lot more than the nearly 20 million Technorati and others track!

So here we go: October 2005.

By country:

Australia: approx 450,000
Still not a lot of hard figures here, but based on report in the Australian Newspaper 19 May 05 and allowing for growth since. Like other members of the Anglosphere though its hard to quantify blog numbers due to the dominance of US blogging firms and .com domains

Austria: approx 20,000
Ref: Loic Le Meur

Belgium: approx 100,000
Skynet: 68,000. There are problems with a definite Belgium count because of the split between French and Dutch speakers. It’s likely that some Belgium bloggers use services in the Netherlands and France, + naturally the Anglosphere offerings.

Bosnia and Herzegovina: less than 3,000
LJ: 1300. Rest unknown

Brunei: less than 3,000
LJ, Blogshares and others.

Canada: approx 700,000
approximation, difficult to ascertain due to the Anglosphere problem, LJ shows 285,000

China: 6 million and growing
ref: http://www.asiamedia.ucla.edu/article.asp?parentid=26700“>South IHT, South China Morning Post. Note the IHT article incorrectly reports 14.2 million which is a Technorati overall figure, however the earlier SCMP piece reported 5 million so we’d think 6 million, possibly more at this stage.

Croatia: approx 50,000
blog.hr which now has just short of 40,000 blogs + a little more for other sites.

Czech Republic: approx 10,000
Ref: Loic

Denmark: approx 15,000
Overskrift.dk has nearly 6,000, Smartlog 2,200, Loic has some earlier figures here.

Finland: approx 100,000
Media=blogi
Same as last quater, unable to ascertain any new figures.

France: approx 3.5 million
Businessweek called it 3 million back in July, and yet Skyblog alone now has 3 million. Ublog 65,000, Canalblog 64,200, Loic for other older figures.

Germany: 300,000
Hugo Martin from June + a little growth on this figure. Unlike France which is dominated by Skyblogs, German bloggers appear to be all over the place.

Greece: less than 5,000
ref: Loic

India: approx 100,000
Financial Express, same figure as last quarter as I couldn’t find anything more up to date but I suspect the number may be a lot more. Certainly India has its own blog awards now as well, and are mentioned in the press.

Iran: 700,000
Yes, this is a remarkable number, but I have it on research from Koorosh Eslamzade, but would note like all the figures here these are total blog numbers and not active blog numbers (which are between 40,000 and 110,000).
Persian Blog: 520,000 , Blogfa : 55,000, Blogsky: 20,000, Mihanblog: 25,000, Parsiblog: 7,000 , Perianlog: 9,500

Ireland: approx 75,000
Loic says 9,000, I don’t believe the figure could be low considering the “Irish economic miracle” of the 1990’s and Irelands continued status of growth and IT friendliness, although the population of just over 4 million people is always going to produce a fairly low figure. Problem again that most Irish bloggers would use Anglosphere blogging sites.

Israel: approx 100,000
thanks Jariv

Italy: approx 250,000
Splinder: 144,000, Excite: 17,500, Bloggers.it: 13,500, Timblog: 12,000, ilcannocchiale.it: 12,000, Aruba: 6,000, LJ: 7,500 + others per Loic.

Japan: at least 5.5 million
Ask Jeeves Japan is currently tracking 5.2 million blogs, suspect the number is much higher again.

Malaysia: approx 20,000
The Star + LJ. Difficult to ascertain as many would blog on anglosphere services such as Blogger.

The Netherlands: approx 600,000
ref: Loic

Philippines: approx 75,000
LJ + Pinoy. Could be significantly larger as writers are using Anglosphere services.

Poland: approx 1.5 million
onet.pl 825,000, Tenbit 228,000 , mylog.pl: 134,500, eblog.pl: 90,00, Blog.pl: 70,000, Blogi.pl: 37,500, Blogx.pl: 44,000 and Ownlog.pl: 13,500 = 1,442,500 + minor services= 1.5 million

Russia: approx 400,000
LJ: 218,000 users. Loic claims 800,000 but I’m putting the figure at 400,000 without any hard evidence, although likely more

South Korea: approx 20 million
See posts here and here + notes from previous blog counts.

Spain: approx 1.5 million
Terra.es reports 1 million MSN Spaces + others.

Ukraine: 50,000
Loic, not updates from last quarter

United Kingdom: 2.5 million
1.5 million UK residents using Spaces as of the end of June (Terra.es ). 227,000+ UK users on Live Journal. Anglosphere problem in estimating figure as many UK bloggers using US services, see notes from July blog count.

United States: approx 30-50 million
Impossible to calculate although there are 4 million on LiveJournal and 3 million on Spaces. Reports that Myspaces hosts 20 million and I’d be guessing that most of these are US based. The US figure would also represent the highest number of abandoned blogs as well.

By host (over 500,000)
Note: these are based on known and rough figures based on media reports and other sources. If you are a blog hosting company and are not included here please send me your user data and I’m happy to add it.

Xanga: 40 million
re: WPXI

MySpace: 20-30 million
most recent number here. Not sure how many are blogging though, have read the figure was 20 million hence 20-30 million, these are also “private blogs” and are not indexed on sites such as Technorati.

MSN Spaces: 18 million
Terra.es + growth over the quarter

Blogger: 15 million +

Cyworld: 13 million

SixApart (Live Journal/ TypePad, MT): 11 million
SixApart figure in recent media releases

Planet Weblog Service: 6 million
Leading South Korean blogging provider (same as last qaurter as no new figure available)

Yahoo Blogs Korea: 3 million

Skyblog: 3 million

Bokee: 2 million

Greatest Journal: 1.16 million

Other US Live Journal clones: 1 million
ref: Perseus

onet.pl 825,000,

Persian Blog: 520,000

A Dynamic Frencg Blogger

I quote this nice reading. Hi arab bloggers. This French bloger can be regarded as a modbloger. He makes sense in the world of blogging.
[start]->
""""Sorry for not being very present on this blog these days, lots of traveling, I went last week to Munich to have dinner with Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO (OK we were about 50 people...) Thanks for the invite, Dr Hubert Burda and Marcel.

I spent a very nice evening even though Steve was a bit corporate in his speech. I was impressed by his charisma. I talked with him and asked a few questions:
"Are blogs important for Microsoft ?"
"Oh yeah, we now have about 20 million, and what about you, what's your occupation ?"
"I am with a small startup, a weblogs software company" I told him with my French accent...
"fantastic, how many do you have ?"
"about 10 million" -Steve is surprised
"and do you have a business model ?" -asks somebody else who just joined the conversation
"yes, yes, we have three brands and some of them have free offers but also very strong sales, such as TypePad and Movable Type"
and we continued talking. Steve was very interested to say the least. I collected a cool business card.

Photos Uncategorized Photo083 1I asked another question after his speech, in public, this one.

"What do you think about the growth of collaborative and free software ? I am thinking about Firefox or Wikipedia compared to Internet Explorer and Encarta, do you see this as an important threat ?"
"It's interesting but as you are a blogger yourself, consider the fact that more and more bloggers get paid in some way to write, some of them because professionals. The question is clear. Sure, Microsoft is a commercial company but we answer one of the key question of our customers: be in charge in case of a problem or a question, provide somebody to talk to."

Actually, think about when you buy software or hardware, do you turn first to online resources or to the hotline of the supplier ? I check first blogs, forums, chat, sites to find my answer and most of the time I find it way quicker and better than if it was through some kind of call center.

I spend a very nice evening. Bonus: two short videos of Steve Ballmer's speech, unfortunately I did not record the part when he quoted Six Apart ;-) vidéo1 et vidéo2

[end]<-

ISP should not identify blogger - court

Victory for free speech on the internet - for Americans
By OUT-LAW.com
Published Friday 7th October 2005 18:56 GMT
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Young blog their way to a publishing revolution

Young blog their way to a publishing revolution

· Poll shows a third of 14- to 21-year-olds now have their own online content
· Fast-changing world of the internet poses challenge to old media

Owen Gibson, media correspondent
Friday October 7, 2005
The Guardian