Blogosphere vs. LinkedInosphere: Free vs. Restricted Association

Joi Ito announced that Technorati is now tracking over 20 million blogs (!).  David Sifry recently provided more statistics on the state of the blogosphere, including:

• it is doubling in size every 5 months
• it is currently growing by 70K new blogs per day (nearly one per second)
• between 2% and 8% are fake or spam blogs
• between 700K and 1.3M posts are made per day (33K / hour, 9.2 / second)
• 5.8% of posts are fake or spam

These are all interesting statistics, but given that blogs are — or can be — conversations, I’d like to know more about the comments and trackbacks in the blogosphere.  One of the commenters on David’s post claimed that there are an additional 30M+ blogs on Xanga and MySpace that are not tracked by Technorati.

Last Wednesday, during a panel on social computing, Konstantine Guernicke (co-founder of LinkedIn) reported that his business-oriented social network service (SNS) has 3.8M users.  I wonder how many SNS "nodes" there are across all the various SNS systems, and what kind of growth these systems are seeing.  I suspect there may be 5 to 10 times as many blogs as there are SNS nodes … and further suspect the rates of growth of blogs is much higher.

All of this brings me back to a point another panelist, Liz Lawley, started out with on Wednesday: she said the social networking service she uses is called a "blog".  At the time, I was thinking this was a rather tongue-in-cheek comment (and probably was, in part), but blogs really do provide a  platform for social networking, especially with hyperlinks, comments, trackbacks, RSS feeds and blogrolls.  Blogs provide more latitude than SNS systems not only in the types and targets of links, but also in the various [other] ways one can represent one’s self — or selves — online (text, photos, music, …).

The restricted nature of SNS profiles may be a feature rather than a bug for some users. I wonder what proportion of LinkedIn users also maintain blogs — less than 20% of my LinkedIn connections have blogs (that I know about), and while most of the 200 people attending the panel were LinkedIn users, I suspect few of them have blogs (I’d estimate less than 10%).  In the other direction, I would assume that most bloggers have at least experimented with one or more SNS systems.

In any case, both blogs and SNS systems provide platforms through which people can more easily reveal more aspects of themselves.  And, with this explosive growth (at least in the blogosphere), I hope more of the richness of the online world will increasingly find its way back into the physical world.