internet - Measuring the Chinese blogosphere

The latest overview of the international blogosphere by language by David Sifry of Technorati (one of the leading weblog search engines in the US) gives some interesting changes. It indicates that English is fast losing its superior position, but not as expected to Chinese but to Japanese. As a percentage of the languages being used according to Sifry Chinese dropped from 25 percent in November 2005 to 15 percent in March 2006. Japanese increases from 31 to 37 percent in the same period.
The dispute on the US-centric service of Technorati is already ranging for some time and many non-English bloggers say their languages are underreported. Ethan Zuckerman summerizes some of those debates. Technorati relies on 'pings' it gets from servers and it misses for example China's largest weblog-service Bokee.com because the company is not really interested in pinging an US-service.
An explanation for the Japanese surge could be their tendency to blog mobile, says Ethan:

Since much blogging in Japan is mobile blogging, posts tend to be shorter and more frequent - since the study considered the number of posts, not the number of blogs, this could partially explain the skew. And it’s possible that some language misidentification is going on as well.