You can’t be cool if you don’t have a blog. Just ask Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus or a certain Mr. Shaun Oakes. From magicians to musical geniuses, everyone seems to have one, and we’ve got all the juicy stats for you right here. Go on, dig in. 

Kat's Note: I know, it's a cheesy lolcat, I take full responsibility. (Image by Joy Studios)

From BlogPulse - The Top Blogs for 20 May 2009 (May 2009)

Nielsen BuzzMetric’s list of the most-linked-to blogs for 20 May 2009: 

1. Slashdot
2. Engadget
3. Mashable
4. Gizmodo
5. Variety
6. Simple Thoughts - Java and Web Blog
7. PC World
8. Lifehacker
9. Think Progress
10. Smashing Magazine

From BlogPulse - The Top Blog Posts for May 20 2009 (May 2009)

Nielsen BuzzMetric’s list of the most-linked-to blog posts for 20 May 2009:

1. New in Labs: Automatic message translation - Official Gmail Blog
2. Palm Pre on June 6th for $200: It's official! - Engadget
3. 100 Amazing Free Wordpress Themes for 2009 - Smashing Magazine    
4. Kansieo.com: Members - Kansieo.com
5. Top 10 Wolfram Alpha Easter Eggs - Mashable   
6. Obama’s $1,300 car tax - Michelle Malkin
7. Palm Pre to run $549 off-contract - Engadget   
8. Animation: Du bist Terrorist - netzpolitik.org
9. Martin Luther King Jr. bio set for bigscreen - Variety
10. Dell debuts colorful new Latitude 2100 netbooks for education - Engadget

From The Nielsen Company - The Most Blogged Topics of April 2009 (May 2009)

Even though it wasn’t until April 24 that the World Health Organisation issued its first Disease Outbreak Notice regarding swine flu, the H1N1 virus still managed to be the most blogged about topic of last month – beating out the Easter Bunny, Nuclear Weapons and those dastardly Somali Pirates in the process. Arrr.

Top 10 Blogged Topics, April 2009:

1. Swine Flu
2. Easter
3. Somali Pirates
4. 2009 NFL Draft
5. Democratic Party
6. Nuclear Weapons
7. Bea Arthur
8. Hugo Chavez
9. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
10. Carrie Prejean

From Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 -  Blogging in Numbers (September 2008)

comScore and Universal McCann both provided different numbers, but it’s plain to see that collectively blogs generate mindboggling amounts of traffic:

comScore MediaMetrix (August 2008)

• Blogs: 77.7 million unique visitors in the US
• Facebook: 41.0 million | MySpace 75.1 million
• Total internet audience 188.9 million

Universal McCann (March 2008)

• 184 million worldwide have started a blog | 26.4 million US
• 346 million worldwide read blogs | 60.3 million US
• 77% of active Internet users read blogs

In terms of demographics:
Technorati surveyed more than 1.2 million bloggers from 66 different countries on six continents.
Of which:

• 70% had degrees
• 66% were male
• 49% of men polled were between the ages of 18 – 34
• Four in ten had an annual household income of $75k or more
• 44% were parents
• 48% were from North America
• 27% were from Europe
• 13% were from Asia
• 1% were from Africa
• 46% said they blog about their profession
• 59% had already been blogging for two years or more

From comScore - comScore UK Blog Statistics for August 2008 (October 2008)

*Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

*Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

*Based on categories attracting 500+ U.K. heavy bloggers in August 2008.

**Excludes traffic from public computers such as Internet cafes or access from mobile phones or PDAs.

***Composition Index = (Percent of visitors to category/Percent of total Internet users) x 100; Index of 100 equals parity. 

From LiveJournal’s stats page  - 29 year olds love LiveJournal (May 2009)

As of May 20 2009 at 10:55 AM, LiveJournal’s user statistics are as follows:

Total accounts:  20,181,217

• Active in some way: 2,289,684
• Updated in last 30 days: 1,183,665
• Updated in last 7 days: 600,301
• Updated in past 24 hours: 225,542

Gender

• Male:  2,695,480 (34.0%)
• Female: 5,243,145 (66.0%)

Most popular countries (Top 5)

• United States - 4,106,818
• Russian Federation - 977,545
• Canada - 367,064
• United Kingdom - 358,530
• Australia - 170,510

Age distribution

• 1,630,624 of all users (who specified their age) are 29 years old, followed by 977,864 who are 20.

From WordPress - WordPress.com statistics (May 2009)

As of May 20 2009 at 11:06 AM, WordPress.com logs:

• 214,753 bloggers
• 201,943 new posts
• 49,849,812 words today

The top ten languages on WordPress are:

1. English: 69%
2. Spanish: 10%
3. Portuguese: 6.6%
4. Italian: 2.4%
5. Turkish: 1.5%
6. German: 1.4%
7. Indonesian: 1.4%
8. French:1.2%
9. Swedish: 0.9%
10. Farsi: 0.8%

Right now the 5 most popular WordPress blogs are:

1. CNN Political Ticker
2. FAIL Blog
3. Celebrity Baby Blog - People.com
4. COED Magazine
5. PEOPLE TV Watch

Additional info: over 200 million people visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and they view over a billion pages on those blogs.

There are over 15 million WordPress publishers: 6 million blogs hosted on WordPress.com, plus 9 million active installations of the WordPress.org software.

WordPress users include TechCrunch, The New York Times and FOX News.

From Alexa.com Alexa site rankings  (May 2009)

As of 20 May 2009:

1. Blogger (no 8)
2. WordPress.com (no 19)
3. BlogSpot (no 52)
4. LiveJournal (no 91)
5. TypePad (no 109)

WordPress.org is ranked at no 688.

Also Check Out:

• Friday Fact Box - Social Media (The Sequel)
• Friday Fact Box - Wordpress