First picture of local blogosphere emerges

The country’s leading internet analyst, Arthur Goldstuck of World Wide Worx, has published some interesting statistics on the local blogosphere. If you haven’t seen it already, he published this on his Thought Leader blog. He collated the data from a variety of blog aggregators and blog hosting platforms, including 24.com, Mweb, Amagama, and iblog. Arthur also looked at the two blog aggregators Amatomu and Afrigator to get an indication of local bloggers on independent blogs or who are part of overseas blog platforms such as Blogger.com and WordPress.com

Here are some of his conclusions:

Number of blogs at end of August: 25 037
Percent of active blogs: 11%
Number of posts in August: 39 938

Goldstuck has calculated the readership for the blogosphere at around 621 204. This figure is unlikely to exclude duplications (a reader would be counted three times if visited three separate blog platforms), but it is never-the-less a good indication. It would also probably put bloggers, if you had to treat them as a single entity, into the top 10 of the local Online Publishers Rankings.