Report: Japanese lead in blogging, blogosphere growth slowing

Japanese has once again taken the top spot as the language with the most blog posts, followed by English, according to a report released on Thursday by blog search site Technorati.

"In terms of blog posts by language, Japanese retakes the top spot from our last report, with 37 percent (up from 33 percent) of the posts followed closely by English at 36 percent (down from 39 percent). Additionally there was movement in the middle of the top 10 languages, highlighted by Italian overtaking Spanish for the number four spot," concludes the "State of the Live Web" report, formerly called "State of the Blogosphere." "The newcomer to the top 10 languages is Farsi, just joining the list at #10." Chinese has the third spot.

Other noteworthy statistics: there are 70 million blogs and about 120,000 new ones come online each day; there are 1.5 million posts per day; and more than one-fifth of the 100 most popular Web sites are blogs. The blogs are led by: Engadget, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, TechCrunch, The Huffington Post, Lifehacker and Daily Kos.

And, as can be expected, the hyper growth of blogs is slowing. "Since our last State of the Blogosphere report in October 2006, we've seen a slowing in the doubling of the size of the blogosphere," the report says. "This shouldn't be surprising, as we're dealing with the law of large numbers--it takes a lot more growth to double from 35 million blogs to 70 million (which took about 320 days) than when it doubled from 5 million to 10 million blogs (which took about 180 days)."