In my past position, I was focused to a great degree on Internet-based monitoring and research.  Over the past few years one of the areas a lot of clients asked about what coverage of the blogosphere. 

There are a variety of methodologies out there and I think they are framed by different perspectives of the Internet. 

So, what is it that we know?

1. There are about 70 million or so blogs out there (Technorati, 2007)
2. 120,000 blogs being launched every day (Technorati, 2007)
3. Of the top 100 most popular sites on the Web, 22 are blogs (Technorati, 2007)
4. A little over 4,000 blogs are considered top-tier (500 inbound links or more) (Technorati, 2006)
5. Blogs follow a power-law distribution with 20% of the population consolidating 80% of the influence (Shirky, 2003)
6. The vast majority of blogs launched will be ‘dead’ within 12 months.  Already, more than 200 million people call themselves ex-bloggers (TimesDaily.com, 2007)

What does this all tell me?

Quite frankly, that the vast majority of the blogosphere is irrelevant.  So how many blogs actually count? 

That, I’d like to hear some opinions on.