Blog Language Rankings

A shocker in the language rankings, as Spanish moves in to bump Icelandic out of the top five!

That's thanks to Fernando Tricas over at Blogalia, who sent in a list of about 2,000 known Spanish blogs. Tricas and his group have been trying to measure the Spanish blogosphere, which (judging by the numbers) is in its absolute infancy. They've published a paper [PDF] on the Spanish blogosphere that they will be presenting at BlogTalk. The paper is a fascinating survey of the microscopic Spanish-language blogging community, and it beautifully illustrates some of the center/periphery relationships that Alek Tarkowski described in his letter a few months ago. You can also see a power-law curve already starting to form, even with just two thousand blogs.

I also got a letter from the versatile Marysia Cywinska-Milonas, who humbles us all by maintaining a trilingual weblog (Polish, French, English). Marysia has been maintaining some great stats about the size of the Polish blogosphere (apparently growing fast thanks to teenagers). Her numbers give a ballpark figure of 90,000 Polish blogs at the beginning of this month.

I find it fascinating that there seems to be no rhyme or reason distinguishing those language communities going crazy for weblogging (English, Farsi, Polish, Icelandic, Portuguese) from the ones that are still barely getting started (Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic). There doesn't seem to be any relationship between the number of speakers and their adoption rate for blogging.

But it's clear that when the blogging bug hits, it hits hard. My advice to TypePad, Blogger, and everyone else trying to make money in this business is to make sure those Spanish-language templates are ready.