Firstly, I should say thank you to Neville Hobson whose blog I read recently and where I got these useful facts. Neville has come across interesting reports highlighting the growth of the European blogosphere with one specifically on UK blogs. (This is a subject close to our hearts as we track blogs and sell insights such as new trends and marketing effectiveness to corporate clients.)
We’ve mentioned in previous posts that the French blogosphere is substantial with 5 million blogs in the skyblog platform alone. The UK blogosphere is also growing, the article can be seen here with additional commentary by Shane Richmond. The report was commissioned by MSN Spaces so there might be issues with impartiality of the study, but the numbers are indicative of higher involvement (up to 7 million bloggers in the UK) and a heavy bias for blogging by young people (up to 42% of under 25s blogging.) From our point of view these numbers “feel” a little high but unquestionably the impact of blogging on UK internet behaviour is very significant.
Watching the cultural differences in Europe both in numbers of participants and posting behaviour is crucial and we will be blogging more about this in the future. It is clear now that UK and France are where most blog conversations take place in Europe but countries in Scandinavia and Poland are emerging.