The Irish Blogosphere - How Big Is It?

Knowing the size of the Irish Blogosphere is an important part of building a search engine for Irish blogs. So far there is no accurate figure for the number of Irish blogs and the rate at which the IrishBlogs group on Yahoo Groups is growing suggests that it could be in the high hundreds. The IrishBlogs tag on Technorati shows only a small cross section of the Irish Blogosphere and depends mainly on the use of tags. These tags, without a quicktag solution (Wordpress) are cumbersome to include with each post.

The main WhoisIreland.com Irish search engine spiders are running here and I’ve just been checking a few keywords on the raw search database. This part of the index (the Irish ie/com/net/org/biz/info websites) is almost complete and the next section is the user/personal/subs websites. The surprising thing is that the term “blog” shows 1771 hits with at least 150 of these sites having their own distinct top level domain. The Irish blogosphere could be somewhat larger, though more fragmented, than was first thought.

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Written by John McCormac on March 29th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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5 comments

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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Tom Raftery
#1. March 30th, 2005, at 1:01 PM.

I still reckon, it depends very much on how you define “Irish Blogs” John. How broad is your definition?

Is my blog Irish? It is owned by an Irish citizen (me!), and hosted in Ireland, but it is a .net, not a .ie and the subject matter is not specifically Irish.

Irishblogs certainly don’t seem to think my blog is Irish!

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#2. March 30th, 2005, at 1:48 PM.

A very broad definition Tom,
The standalone blogs (blogs with their own domain) tend not to be .ie due to the cost. The people running Irishblogs.ie (Browseireland) have been paying attention to the blog here but somehow I don’t think that they would even risk putting it on their list. After all, they seem to have got most of their ideas from here. :)

The definition is broad enough to include blogs operated by Irish people or people living in Ireland and blogs that concentrate mainly on Irish matters. (The definition is almost getting to the “What have the Romans ever done for us?” stage.)

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com John McCormac
#3. March 30th, 2005, at 4:14 PM.

From what I can see, Irishblogs.ie was just cargo-culting along with a list of blogs.

Well Karlin writes the Net Results column in each Friday’s Irish Times so there is a link with Ireland. Now that Karlin is moving back to the USA, the link would depend on contributions to Irish publications and if the Irish Times continues to have a Friday technology section. On the IT grounds it would be an Irish related blog.

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Tom Raftery
#4. March 30th, 2005, at 4:29 PM.

Like I said John - their definition seems extremely arbitrary - they include Karlin but not you or I.

I say we start our own realirishblogs.ie and not let them play!

Tom

Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Tom O’Connor
#5. April 7th, 2005, at 8:14 PM.

Its good to share!