Finding Blogs that Count

The WSJ had an interesting article on May 26 where the author, Carl Bialik, 'The Numbers Guy', explored several techniques for counting the number of blogs worldwide. He consulted numerous blog search companies such as Technorati as well as popular blog sites including The Truth Laid Bear to hear different perspectives on blog counting, ranking and popularity. Depending on the counting approach involved, there could be anywhere from 30 to 100 million blogs already created. There is no perfect method to determine the real number.

The most important point is that the actual number of blogs isn't all that meaningful, but finding blogs that count is very important.

A quality control manager may only need to find a relatively small sample set of product owners discussing issues in order to determine if there are new problems with a particular product that haven't bubbled up through a company's CRM system or channel partners yet.

If a marketer is more interesting in emerging trends they may need to look at a larger sample set over a longer period of time to understand shifting sentiment or variances in discussion on a particular topic. But even in the case of trend analysis, the number of blogs that are meaningful to assess could be counted in the hundreds rather than in the millions.

It's important to focus on a representative set of blogs that reflect the audience that you are trying to communicate to or gain knowledge from. Rather than worrying about how many millions of blogs there might be, it's important to identify a large enough sample set across the many millions of blogs to find the hundreds of blogs every day that are discussing the companies, products, people and issues in your space.