1.5 million French bloggers on Skyblog
by Duncan
April 30, 2005
Reports today that French blogging service Skyblog now has 1.5 million bloggers blogging in French, an extraordinary figure that has previously been underestimated in English speaking media and elsewhere.
The figure represents one of the largest non-English speaking blog communities outside of Asia.
How can media underestimate the figures if they’re available on the page itself?
Media can underestimate figures simply by drawing estimates from what they gather on common blog directories. Those, with very few exceptions, cater to an English-speaking audience and not that many French-speaking bloggers bother getting listed on them. Thus, the ease with which figures can be underestimated.
Doesn’t take too much detective work to estimate the volume of blogging by just hitting the search engines:
http://www.google.fr/search?hl=fr&q=site%3Askyblog.com&meta=
663,000 pages indexed from skyblog.com in Google.
But they still only manage to have a PR6. With only 11,000 backlinks.
And according to Yahoo:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=slv1-&p=site%3askyblog.com
There’s over 70 million pages from that domain…
And over 65 million back links!
http://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=slv1-&p=link%3ahttp%3a%2f%2fwww.skyblog.com
skyblog.com really asks a lot of questions when you sign up. Your phone number among other things… It’s not that bad, but when adding comments on their blog, I haven’t seen one yet that lets you add your url in the comment. My french is rusty.
These figures are no big surprise – remember that France is a huge country and that the French are traditionally very politically active – I think blogging to them is simply an extension of their “cafe society”