Dave Sifry, the CEO of Technorati, has a regular series of posts called The State of the Blogosphere where provides various statistics about the number of blogs Technorati is tracking. In State of the Blogosphere, October 2005 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth he writes
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 .
The growth of the Chinese blogosphere on MSN Spaces is a trend those of us working on Spaces have seen first hand. I wouldn't be surprised if we are one of the biggest blog hosting services for Chinese bloggers. An interesting side effect of this growth is that an increasing number of blogs in the Technorati Top 100 are blogs that are popular with Chinese users of MSN Spaces.
Below is a list of the MSN Spaces on today's version of the top 100 list
27. spaces.msn.com/members/princesscecicastle11,999 links from 3,455 sites. View All » 30. Hack MSN SpacesSpaces Customization at its Best™ By Devdutt Parikh12,540 links from 3,329 sites. View All » 41. spaces.msn.com/members/slimBy slim8,569 links from 2,771 sites. View All » 47. Herramientas para BlogsHerramientas para spaces. Un blog sobre personalización de los spaces By mmadrigal madrigal7,309 links from 2,578 sites. View All » 49. Scott's "SiteExperts" PlaceWeb developers, Web developers, Web developers! MSN Client architect who shares his thoughts on DHTML, AJAX, Client Frameworks, etc., and how we are engineering MSN properties. By Scott Isaacs7,103 links from 2,509 sites. View All » 66. spaces.msn.com/members/flowersummer6,405 links from 2,118 sites. View All » 71. spaces.msn.com/members/locker2manBy locker2man5,358 links from 2,026 sites. View All » 74. spaces.msn.com/members/hcy5216,640 links from 2,007 sites. View All »
27. spaces.msn.com/members/princesscecicastle11,999 links from 3,455 sites. View All »
30. Hack MSN SpacesSpaces Customization at its Best™ By Devdutt Parikh12,540 links from 3,329 sites. View All »
41. spaces.msn.com/members/slimBy slim8,569 links from 2,771 sites. View All »
47. Herramientas para BlogsHerramientas para spaces. Un blog sobre personalización de los spaces By mmadrigal madrigal7,309 links from 2,578 sites. View All »
49. Scott's "SiteExperts" PlaceWeb developers, Web developers, Web developers! MSN Client architect who shares his thoughts on DHTML, AJAX, Client Frameworks, etc., and how we are engineering MSN properties. By Scott Isaacs7,103 links from 2,509 sites. View All »
66. spaces.msn.com/members/flowersummer6,405 links from 2,118 sites. View All »
71. spaces.msn.com/members/locker2manBy locker2man5,358 links from 2,026 sites. View All »
74. spaces.msn.com/members/hcy5216,640 links from 2,007 sites. View All »
It is interesting to note that every space on the Technorati Top 100 list is either Chinese or is about customizing/hacking the MSN Spaces user interface which is popular among our Chinese users. I'd never have guessed that these would be the most popular spaces when we launched the service last year.