The number of bloggers and blogs is growing at a fantastic pace. According to a report by Universal McCann (March 2008) there are 184m internet users who write a blog, with China emerging as a leader, with 42m users, more than USA and western Europe combined. Individuals, and organizations are both adopting blogging as a means to express and reach out.

It is interesting to find out what these 184 million bloggers write about. Nielsen BuzzMetrics has a tracker online which is a real time snapshot of what are people blogging about. The tracker is updated every minute. To my surprise, technology is not the number one item that people are writing about. The myth that blogging has been a niche of the techno savvy, opinioned geeks seems to have been busted by this data. As per the report, 30% of all blog posts are diaries, which are personal entries on people’s own life, environment and interests. The diaries at 30% stand much taller than many other categories combined.

Entertainment (Movies/TV) stands at number two, the second most blogged topic, but a distant laggard at only around 5% of all blog posts. Sports and Politics closely follow.

Nielsen BuzzMetrics are created based on text mining of the blog posts and then assigning the post type to them.

Technorati follows a different methodology to identify post content, which is the tags associated with the post. The latest, state of the blogosphere report 2008 (technorati), report from technorati is pretty interesting. As per the report, three quarters of all bloggers blog about three or more topics. Personal/Lifestyle is the most written about topic, followed by technology. “Others”, News, Politics, Internet etc. Others has been treated as an aggregate of topics from the 2008 election, alternative energy, art, beauty, blogging, comics, communication, cooking/food, crafts, design, environment, internet/Web 2.0, Jamaica, and media/journalism.

Technorati’s report also has a classification of data by gender, and geography.