I have to say — I really like MyBlogLog. I liked it so much I wrote a review about it, and heck, I have given over real estate on this blog so that I might bask in all of its its bloglog glory (and of course, find out who is coming to visit my blog). Yesterday, the ubiquitous “Eric” of MyBlogLog, who is automatically added as your contact when you signed in, happened to pop by my Blog (Hey Eric — great job with MyBlogLog … let us know how the Yahoo acquisitions rumours go!). And it got me thinking.

How many bloggers are signed up for this thing?

Well, its easy to find out. Unless you’ve “deleted” Eric as a contact, just go to his profile on MyBlogLog (just click on his face). Check out how many contacts HE has. Assuming that many people haven’t deleted HIM as a contact, that’s probably a very, very good guestimate as to how many bloggers he’s signed on.As of this writing, its … 23,901 contacts.

(Hey, for fun, Eric should post contact “milestones” — like, who his 50 000th, 100 000th and so on.)

So that means he’s got over 23 000 bloggers signed up for the program. Now those numbers in and of them self are pretty modest (compare it to over 500 000 accounts at Digg for example), but, this number is, I think, much more important than merely another statistic.

Especially when you consider that in the technosphere, it seems like almost every single blog has these darn things (again, a hefty presumption, but that’s the kind of back-of-the-envelope math that we’re going to be exploring).
So, what does 23,901 mean? It means a few things.

1) This number is a measure of “active” bloggers; casual bloggers, or sploggers won’t necessarily be adding this widget to their blog. So don’t let that huge number of “100 000 blogs started a day ” courtesy of Mr. Sifry fool you. The actual number of bloggers creating sites for the long haul is probably much, much, much less. And therefore …

2) The number of “active” bloggers is probably much, much less than the stratospheric numbers that Technorati touts. Sure, there’s the obvious skewing because TECH blogs are more likely to post this sort of stuff up, but in orders of magnitude (Technorati says there are over 50 millions of blogs ), I think this back-of-the envelope thinking is in the right ball park. This leads to the fact that –

3) To reach a “critical mass” of bloggers doesn’t require that many bloggers. As I said, sure, its a “tech” skew, but even if it IS, the blogosphere (the North American one at least), has a disproportionately larger percentage of tech blogs anyway. If you cruise around blogs that talk about tech topics … try not to go all “ad-blind” for a second, and you’ll see how many of them actually sport the MyBlogLog widget. I don’t have any research on it — but it seems like all of the blogs I check out now sport them.

If you’re a social networker or marketer, or a startup interested in the blogosphere, you’ll pay close attention to this. Sure, everyone follows the “Pareto rule” (80/20 and all that), but say you CAN’T target the Dave Winer’s of this world. Well, if you’re interested in hitting up the “long tail”, say, it might only take in the order of 10 000 - 50 000 bloggers (as of this writing) 2006 to create a really significant impact on the blogosphere. That’s “all”.

Its almost like its the number for achieving blogger “critical mass”.

If you’re a startup, you might think of using this as a benchmark number if you’re targeting bloggers. When you’ve hit 20-50 000 you might approach VC’s and say “we’ve now hit critical mass”. And if you’re thinking like a marketer, maybe you should try and establish this as a yardstick for “reach”. Hit that number of blogs if you’re advertising, and you’ll be saturating the blogosphere.

So, let’s settle back to reality for a second. What does 23,901 mean? Clearly the number is influenced by who is rapidly taking up the widget; its skewed by the fact its mostly early adopters at the moment. But amongst tech blogs certainly, anecdotal evidence, for what its worth (and isn’t that an oxymoron), points to the fact that this number represents an approximate number of blogs it might take to make a noticable difference in the blogopshere. Sure it might be a stretch. But I think this number, or at least this order of magnitude, has a certain kind of significance.

And given what an impact MyBlogLog has had, its certainly MORE than just the numbers of subscribers at this time.

Update 1: Given this blog entry, it looks like only one tenth of that number represents actual widgets installed — closer to 2000 “recent widgets” have been installed. Which might make that magic number a whole lot lower. And come to think of it, it makes sense … I’ve encountered individuals who don’t seem to have claimed any blogs — but 10x more accounts than blogs?.