A few blog related numbers came across my desk, so I thought to pass them on.

More Than 100 Million Blogs

The Blog Herald has a brandnew count on the number of blogs worldwide. There are two sets of figures: based on blogs per country, the figure would be around 75 million, which is a patchy figure because it is difficult to count blogs based on the country of origin due to the worldwide phenomenon of people using US companies for hosting their blogs. Based on blogs created at major hosts (a more accurate measure) the figure is actually 134-144 million. So, a round 100 million + blogs figure seems accurate.

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, maybe 40-50% of every blog on Googles Blogspot domain is a spam blog, but the vast majority of blogs out there aren’t.

Blogs starting to make an impression in German Elections

Germany statistically has one of the lowest number of blogs per head of population in Europe according to the last Blog Herald Blog Count in July, and notably lags behind its neighbours France and Poland.

Deutsche Welle reports that Germany is still “in the teething stages when it comes to political online journals” however a number of blogs are now starting to be heard, including kamikaze-demokratie. Read more…

Spammers Infringing Trademarks

The first news item mentioned spam blogs on freely hosted services such as Blogspot and Blogsome. Oftentimes, the spammer leaves no personally identifiable information in any of the profiles or on the blog itself (duh!). Let’s assume for the moment that a spammer infringes your registered trademark, for example by registering “generalmotors.blogspot.com”. Blogger refuses to get involved and remove the infringing site, asking you to contact the spammer directly. Yeah, right. Does anyone have advice on how to proceed?