47% of all blog posts are tagged

David Sifry provides more Technorati stats, this time with a little more info on the tagging front.

Turns out tagging is really kicking off. The number of posts with tags or categories has grown past 100 million mark since Technorati began tracking tags in January of 2005:

Nearly half (47%) of all blog posts have an author-generated category or set of tags associated with the post. For this analysis, Technorati excluded generic or default categories, like "General" or "Diary", which some services put into each post if the author doesn't specify a particular tag or category. We only counted posts that used a non-default tag or category."

and that each post tagged have:

"one or more tag or category associated with the post"

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Tags: tags tagging tagtastic

Comments

• Anonymous
  May 02, 2006
  I have recently started blogging and since I work for a CMS company I am very familliar with "tagging" content.  We have a taxonomy module that allows you to "tag" your content in our CMS.  With blogs however, how is this any different than the "keywords" located in a Web pages <meta> tag?  I.e. what does this statistic really mean?
  
  I am a huge fan of the "Cloud" process some sites have built into their blogging software that shows "tagged" content in bolder fonts if it is more popular.  It even prompted me to think about an element in our product that would expose that type of content automatically.
  
  However, since the "tags" applied to the content are indexed in much the same way as content is indexed in a Web site today are we really getting any better than we were in the past?
  
  By the way, I have been reading your blog for many months now and I enjoy your point of view.
• Anonymous
  May 02, 2006
  The 47% statistic refers to the blogs that Technorati checks, which does not represent the entire blogosphere.  Many personal blogs don't really interact with the greater blogging community.  And they tend not to sign up with Technorati (and thus are not in Technorati's searches).  These blogs report the day to day events of personal individuals, and they often have no intent of tagging their blogs for the benefit of the blogosphere.  So I'm sure the 47% statistic will continue to grow if it only represents the part of the blogosphere that interacts with each other and reports news and events other than bloggers' personal lives.
• Anonymous
  May 02, 2006
  fair point techie. I agree that the Technorati stat is representive and not absolute.
  
  I'm curious on this comment you made: "Many personal blogs don't really interact with the greater blogging community. " You might be right, but what data can you point me to that supports this view?
  
  
  
  
• Anonymous
  May 02, 2006
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  May 02, 2006
  techie;
  
  While the gist of your comment regarding the adoption of Technorati is on target, I'm not sure the particulars are.
  
  Signing up for Technorati means that you can configure your blog to ping them and to be crawled by their spider more quickly, but I don't think it's the only way they discover content.  I believe they'll index anything with rel=tag relationships, and that they find content by other means than by pinging.
  
  While this probably doesn't mean much (Technorati is still a microcosm of the blogosphere) it may be an imoportant distinction.  Or not.
• Anonymous
  May 03, 2006
  i see what you are techie -  tagging by small networks for small networks, yes? i do this all the time. opml is an example (that said, that small network is growing).
• Anonymous
  August 14, 2006
  Clearly a classic post on the topic of tagging, but I've not seen it before: A cognitive analysis of...