My post from yesterday started some discussion. First about, what's a Swiss blog (in short: “you live here, or you're Swiss”), then how to technically finding that out (GeoURL etc) and its limitations.

There's also another question: When is a blog a blog? When I (as site owner) call it a blog? When it has a comment function? When it has an RSS/Atom Feed?

Here are some figures:

  • Blog.ch has currently 423 blogs listed, 322 active in the last 30 days.
  • Searching for blog on Google for only Switzerland stops after 291 entries, then the message “ In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 291 already displayed.” appears, no idea how accurate that is, it at least doesn't go much further than 1000 on any word on the main search.. My Interpretation of this result is, that Google thinks, there are 291 relevant webpages in Switzerland, which have to say something about blogs :)
  • GeoURL lists 472 “blogs” which are 300 km or less away from central Switzerland.

I unfortunately couldn't come up with more figures. If anyone has any ideas, please stand up ;)

My conclusion? The 1500 Swiss weblogs figure seems very optimistic for me at the moment, especially if we want to take only more or less active blogs into account and not counting all the “I use a blog tool for my corporate news section, where one simple database table would have been enough back in the nineties. And please turn off the commenting feature
”

But with the gaining popularity of blog.ch we should be able to get a more accurate figure, as hopefully every self-respectful blogger will enlist there :) OTOH, if (and that's a big if, in my opinion) blogs take over the mass-market via telcos and other big companies then we can forget about that method of counting, as a big part of their users will most certainly not care about something like a “blogosphere”.