The State of the Genealogy Blogosphere

A little over a year ago, I published some statistics gleaned from the Genealogy Blog Finder database. In the past year, I've tinkered with the search engine to make it a bit more efficient and reliable, and added a map showing Who's Blogging Where. A few new categories were added—the most recent being French-Canadian & Acadian Genealogy Blogs. The site has had about 165,000 page views in the past year, bringing the total pages viewed since October 2006 to about 415,000.

The number of blogs in the directory has risen to 1384 since the last report, a net gain of 420 (a 44% increase over last year's total).

Here are some statistics, as of about an hour ago:

• 142 blogs (10%) were updated in the last two days
• 329 blogs (24%) were updated in the last week
• 547 blogs (40%) were updated in the last month
• 926 blogs (67%) were updated in the last six months
• 1096 blogs (79%) were updated in the last year
• 861 blogs (62%) are published on the (free) "blogspot.com" domain
• 131 blogs (9%) are published on the (free) "wordpress.com" domain
• 70% of blogs abandoned before 2008 were published on the "blogspot.com" domain
• 7% of blogs abandoned before 2008 were published on the "wordpress.com" domain
• 1% of blogs either don't syndicate their content or have an unusable feed
• 928 blogs (67%) have a geographical location assigned
  
• 444 blogs (32%) have the word "Genealogy" in the title
• 2 blogs have the word "Genealogue" in the title

The most interesting change I see is the increased use of WordPress, which has increased (as a percentage of new blogs added) almost tenfold since last year. Blogger remains the dominant free blogging platform, though, playing host to about two-thirds of the blogs added since June 2008.*

*These numbers don't include WordPress and Blogger blogs hosted on domains other than wordpress.com and blogspot.com.