The hidden blogosphere; dark matter.

SCOTLAND. French blogger Cyril Fievet interviewed Ceri Moran. Moran's Blog City hosts blogs. Cyril says the interview "gives a few figures: 10.000 active free bloggers in the community, and 300 "branded blogs" (community blogs created by companies or clubs...)"

The Blog City branded blogs helps with Gonzo Marketing. Multiply your corporate voice by helping each person in your world (employee, customer, supplier) to find and share their own voices. Blogs and discussion forums serve well. You lose some control (that you never really had) and gain goodwill through financial and moral support of these stakeholders.

One of Blog City's services is to host enterprise blog servers, inside firewalls. UserLand does this with Manila. These blogs are largely uncountable. They don't, for the most part, participate in public search engines, syndication services, directories, pinged update servers (like weblogs.com), or other open community engines. While commercial software vendors like UserLand may know how many servers are under license, they typically won't know how many blogs have been created or are active on those servers.

Cosmologists calculating the mass of the universe weren't able to make their calculations work without including matter they couldn't see. Blogcount will soon face the same challenge.