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Japanese lead explosion of blogging

Online Web blogs mushroomed to more than 72 million this year, with Japanese now the most prolific posters to the popular personal journal Web pages, an Internet research company said yesterday.

The popular online personal journal technology, which exploded on the Web only about five years ago, has now spread around the world, with Japanese the biggest bloggers, ahead of English-language bloggers and the rapidly growing Chinese blogging community according to Technorati, which tracks blog content.

Blogging has also exploded in politically repressed countries, with Iran's Farsi language also scoring high and rising in blogging rankings, the San Francisco company said.

In its State of the Live Web report, Technorati said the number of blogs around the world surged from 8 million in March 2005 to more than 72 million last month.

New Weblogs are being created at a rate of 120,000 daily, or three every two seconds, as compared to 25,000 new Weblogs launching on the Internet daily in March 2005, Technorati said.

But the rate at which the "blogosphere" doubles in size has slowed from once every six months to once a year, said David Sifry, Technorati's founder.

Sifry acknowledged there were probable undercounts in some countries, such as France, where users of the popular Skyblog platform do not make it into his company's database.

Ethan Zuckerman and Rebecca MacKinnon, co-founders of international blog aggregator Global Voices Online, said differences in Weblog tools and techniques around the world make it tough to accurately track growth of the blogosphere as it factionalizes based on cultures. MacKinnon said there are an estimated 40 million Weblogs in China alone.
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