Renie Ravin of IndiBlogger.in recently shared some interesting data with me from the 7895 blogs that IndiBlogger.in crawls. IndiBlogger.in is a vibrant community of Indian blogs with some excellent features like a topic-wise directory with ranks (IndiRank) and a meme-tracker (IndiVine).
I have put together the highlights in an IndiBlogger.in State of the Indian Blogosphere Dashboard –
You can also have a look at the full State of the Indian Blogosphere report at SlideShare –
Here are the highlight of the report –
- More than three-fourths of the blogs in the IndiBlogger.in community are written by men.
- The top five languages are English, Hindi, Tamil, Marathi and Telugu. 92% of the blogs are in English. Renie believes that Indic languages are under-represented in the IndiBlogger.in community, but the distribution between various Indic languages should be representative.
- The top five cities are Bangalore, Chennai, NCR, Mumbai and Hyderabad, which together account for almost three-fourths of all blogs. The city-wise distribution should be fairly representative, but the metros might be over-represented in the sample because these blogger may be more aware of IndiBlogger.in.
- The community is fairly active with 8% posting daily, 47% posting at least weekly and 88% posting at least monthly. In terms of recency, more than 80% blogs have been updated at least once in 2009. Both the frequency and recency data should be fairly representative.
- About 19% of the blogs have a Google PageRank or 3 or above and about 18% have an Alexa Traffic Rank of 3,000,000 or lower. These stats should also be representative.
- The Indian National Interest, Digital Inspiration and Gauravonomics are the three tops blogs in India, as per IndiBlogger.in’s IndiRank algorithm. Rankings are always controversial, and IndiRank certainly is, because many important Indian bloggers haven’t registered their blogs on IndiBlogger.in yet. I think IndiBlogger.in should not limit itself to submitted blogs and include as many Indian blogs as possible, starting with all the blogs in Amit Agarwal‘s directory of Indian bloggers. The blog owners can claim it later, if they are interested. This will quickly fix the issue of credibility of the rankings. Also, I think that there’s value in being totally transparent about the ranking formula, like the AdAge Power 150 Ranking. Let’s see if I can convince Renie to make these changes.
Maneesh Madambath at WATBlog has also written a blog post on the IndiBlogger.in statistics.
In the next IndiBlogger.in State of the Indian Blogosphere report, it might be interesting to do an analysis of how these stats have changed over time. It might also be interesting to use the IndiBlogger.in databse for network analysis using a tool like Linkfluence.
If you want more details of the study, or have suggestions on what other data might be interesting, or want to help us out with new types of analysis, contact Gaurav Mishra or Renie Ravin, or leave a comment below.
Cross-posted at Global Voices.
