The Blogosphere (Tree)mapped

I was intrigued by this effort to count the number of blogs around the world and offer a break down by region, if not country. The results, though very rough, and which include large slabs of the world (like South America), offer up some interesting conclusions, particularly for Asia. Bottom line is that there is a huge chunk of the world blogging outside the English language.

Here, just the hell of it, is a rough treemap I put together of the data provided by The Blog Herald’s Duncan:

The overall total is in the 60 million mark (and of course this figure is open to questioning, as it was by my colleague at WSJ.com, Carl the numbers guy). The pink covers the very broad figure of those U.S-based blog hosters, and includes speculative figures for the UK, Australasia etc. Light blue is Asia — the bits too small to have their labels visible are for South and South East Asia, both roughly host to 1 million bloggers each, and the much smaller, redder boxes cover Russia, Africa and the Middle East. The darker blue box is France.)

Even if the South Korean figure is off, there’s still a striking element to all this, which I think sometimes gets lost in the blogosphere noise: Asians are blogging in their own languages in huge numbers, roughly equal to the ‘Anglophone’ world, and yet there’s very little crossover between these groups, or even among them. Worthy of a closer look, methinks.