14 million blogs, 1.4 billion links between them

James Cherkoff pinged me and let me know of a BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast, Shop Talk, where he was invited to take part in a discussion on corporate blogs earlier this week.

Listened to it this morning and enjoyed the show (is available for streaming).

I liked this quote (paraphrased) from James.

"The figure that is often quoted is the number of blogs out there, currently 14 million blogs.
The figure that I think is more interesting is the fact that there are 1.4 billion links between those blogs."

I don't know where he got the number (James, where? That's an average of a thousand one hundred links per blog!). Whatever the number, he's right to point out the connectivity between the blogs. It is this interlinking, cross referencing and trackbacking that makes blogs such a conversational and dynamic medium.

Also on the show were Adriana Cronin Lukas of the Big Blog Company, Simon Phipps of Sun Microsystems, Azeem Azhar, Heather Platts and Thomas Mahon, a Savile Row tailor, who runs the English Cut blog.