A friend of mine asked: how many webloggers are there? This is like "How big is the Internet?"

I searched through Nua and a dozen other internet sites and haven't seen any research on the size of the blogosphere.

I ask you:

1. Do you have an educated guess?
2. Do you know of any prior work in this area?
3. Can you think of a methodology or two to create useful measures of the number of bloggers and the number of weblogs?
4. What related questions would you want answered?
5. How might you use this information?
6. Pitfalls to avoid?
7. Would you join a BlogCensus.org to provide and share stats?

My wild stabs:

1. Do you have an educated guess?
• Not yet.
2. Do you know of any prior work in this area?
• No. I've looked.
3. Can you think of a methodology or two to create useful measures of the number of bloggers and the number of weblogs?
• Some vendors host weblogs and have relevant stats. We could add those up.
• We could look at download and registrations from the top 5 vendors, and add fudge factors to cover other tools and disadoption rates

4. What related questions would you want answered?

• LiveJournal.com, has a statistics page: (numbers as of 10 November 2002)
• Total users: 770910
• Users that have ever updated: 635168
• Users updating in last 30 days: 280213
• Users updating in last 7 days: 200543
• Users updating in past 24 hours: 72587
• Gender:
• Male: 201452 (36.3%)
• Female: 354085 (63.7%)
• Unspecified: 131153
• Account Type
• Free Account: 718109 (93.2%)
• Early Adopter: 14282 (1.9%)
• Paid Account: 36718 (4.8%)
• Permanent Account: 1218 (0.2%)
• Country of origin (Mostly English-speaking)
• US state of origin (California, New York, Florida, Michigan lead)
• Age distribution (mode=17)
• Client usage (90% web)
• Activity: posts by day overall (147k posts last Wednesday) Per-person would be interesting too.
• New accounts per day (eyeballing a chart it looks like 900-1400 new LJ users per day, averaging about 1100)
• I'd love to know:
• How many entries have ever been blogged? (the cumulative number of posts).
• How many links in posts? (excluding blogrolls and navigation)
• What blogging tool or service they're using?
• Blog lifecycles:
• How long to bloggers of various stripes blog?
• How many change hosts? Change tools?
• Why do people abandon blogging?
• Is there a critical mass, a minimum number of posts per day/week/month that separates those that blog from those that fail?
• Of people who take a break, how many start again?
• Number originating within a company or operating behind a firewall
• Connection speed (does broadband make it easier to blog?)
• Payload distribution. How many people include pictures, sounds, flash games, or movies? How many bytes are home pages?
• Syndication. What percentage syndicate their sites?
• Duplication/Overlap:
• How many blogs per person?
• Do you post to them equally? How many are updated daily/weekly/monthly?
• How many tools do you use?
• What ancillary tools do you use?
• Graphics and other media
• News readers
• HTML editors
• email clients
• blog-specific search (daypop, google)
• blogosphere navigation (blogdex, blogtree)
5. How might you use this information?
1. As a blogger.
• Always good to know where I stand in relation to the pack.
• Trends might tip me to new capabilities
2. As a consultant or IT leader.
• Make better choices about deploying blogging and community tools
• Use the "bandwagon" sell when appropriate
3. As a blog tool maker.
• Understand the markets I serve vs. the ones I don't 
6. Pitfalls to avoid?
• Hype
• Irreproducible results
• Bias - vendor, country
7. Would you join an BlogCensus.org to provide and share stats?
• As a user, with anonymity.
• As a vendor, sure.

What say you?