The Japanese do it all the time (at night, they can do it 4.5 million times every hour). The British and the Americans do it quite a lot. The Chinese do it only occasionally — but they are still way ahead of the French, the Russians, and the Iranians, who barely do it at all.

The world’s appetite for blogging — jotting down personal thoughts and opinions online — was revealed yesterday in a new report, The State of the Blogosphere, published by Technorati, the blog-search website. More than 70 million weblogs, or blogs, are tracked by Technorati, which says that 1.4 new ones are created every second, along with 17 new postings.

The world’s most popular blogs range from Engadget, a technology blog, to Cute Overload, dedicated to photographs of small furry animals.

The oldest continuing one is thought to be Scripting News, launched in 1997 by a software developer called Dave Winer. It helped to establish a technology called “Really Simple Syndication”, used to publish updates.

One thing will probably not surprise the world’s bosses: data shows that bloggers tend to write their blogs when they are supposed to be working.

Nevertheless, Technorati reports that growth in the rate of postings is finally slowing. Dave Sifry, the 39-year-old software entrepreneur who founded the company, noted: “While there are spikes in blog posts during times of significant world crisis — for instance, last summer’s conflict between Israel and Hezbollah — the overall trend is that posting volume is growing more slowly.”

Between 2004 and 2006, the blogosphere doubled in size every 150 to 220 days. Now it is doubling only every 320 days, although this may also be related to Technorati’s ability to filter-out “splogs”, or spam blogs, created by marketers.

Spikes are not just related to news events — the most recent one came when erotic pictures of a 20-year-old American Idol contestant, Antonella Barba, were published online.

Yesterday’s report came amid speculation on Wall Street that Google or Microsoft could make a multibillion-dollar bid for Technorati.

Tongue-tied

— Three blogs are created every two seconds

— Japanese is the dominant blog language. Of 70 million weblogs, 37 per cent are written in Japanese. English is second, with 36 per cent

— Chinese remained in third place this year but Italian overtook Spanish to become the fourth most popular blogging language

— Farsi, the most widely spoken Persian language, is the tenth most popular

— Of the Top 100 media websites, 22 are blogs, rising from 12 last year

Source: www.sifry.com

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