Long before there was the Power 150 Top Marking Blogs, Constantin Basturea has kept a comprehensive list of all public relations blogs and feeds, a much narrower field than ToddAnd’s ranking of both PR and Marketing blogs. You can subscribe to all of the blogs via an OPML file.
Over the weekend, he released an update of the number of PR blogs right on the heels of CEO of Technorati David Sifry, who released his report on the State of the Live Web (new official name) last Friday.
Constantin reports 674 feeds about PR, these include blogs, podcasts and other “feeds” that deliver information about public relations. This is up 7 percent from January 8, 2007, when the total stood at 624 feeds and a 51 percent increase over the same time last year.
I have a little competition running to guess how many feeds there will be at the end of 2007, if you care to join in. The archive of PR feeds since Constantin began to track it in 2005 can be found at his archive page of PR feeds (minus the two I show above).
Just like the regular blogosphere, the PRosphere is showing a slowdown in its rate of growth, perhaps due to maturity and the limited pool of interested content creators. Since last April, PR feeds have grown by 51 percent. This is a big increase, but not a doubling. The same is true of the blogosphere as a whole. Sifry reports that Technorati is tracking 70 million blogs, but that the rate of creation has slowed from its pace of doubling every six months to more like every 10 months. Moreover, he says the rate of posting has slowed, which I can attest to personally.
Spam blogs have also become a real problem, though Sifry maintains that they are not crashing the infrastructure:
Spam and splogs (spam blogs) continue to be a problem in the blogosphere, and there was a marked increase in splogs that coincided with the holiday season last year. Technorati has been tracking between 3,000 – 7,000 new splogs created each day….My personal take on the issue of spam is that all healthy ecosystems have parasites – the only question is whether or not the system is structurally vulnerable to being overwhelmed. Thankfully, because of the accountability that is built into the web itself (the URL structure is fundamentally accountable), I believe that while the vulnerability of the live web to spam is real, it is manageable (sic).”
I wish that Technorati would report the number of blogs that are abandoned, as they did in the October 2, 2004 State of the Blogosphere report. In that report they noted that about “45% of all older weblogs have not had a post in 3 months.” This statistic is meaningful because if you applied it to the current numbers, that would mean that only 38.5 million blogs are actually active.
It is meaningful that just over half of all blogs continue to be active, and I wonder how much that percentage has changed over two years? I hope they consider bringing that statistic back.
Note: If you have a PR-themed blog, podcast or other RSS feed enabled content, and do not appear on Constantin’s list, you can contact him and let him know.
