Grumpy Old Bookman has an interesting post about the significance of blogs. He summarizes some stats from a Financial Times article:

Most blogs have very few readers. Only two blogs get over 1 million readers a day, the 100th most popular blog has only 9,700 readers a day, and the 1,000th has under 600.

GOB uses that stat to imply that he’s in the top 1000 blogs, since he gets about 600 visits a day. I think he must be using a different stats package from me, because there’s no doubt in my mind that he’s more popular than Word Munger is, and Word Munger gets almost 600 visits a day. Furthermore, the FT article has got to be way off base, because there’s no way in hell Word Munger is among the top 1,000 blogs. Top 100,000 might be more like it.

Cognitive Daily once cracked the Technorati top 5,000 — but it was getting over 3,000 visits a day at the time (those numbers have gone down with the transition to ScienceBlogs). Based on those numbers alone I suspect the FT article is off by an order of magnitude at the low end. While I can’t speak for the top two, I’d bet number 100 gets more like 100,000 visits a day, and number 1,000 gets more like 20,000.

When did they start calling the Thirty Years War the “Thirty Years War”? Halfway through? What about the Hundred Years War? You can’t call it “The Long War” until it’s over. Do you think the folks who fought the Thirty Years War were humming along in year 25 saying to themselves, “hmmm… we better fight this thing for at least another 5 years, just so we have a nice round number”?