About the Census

Despite all the recent interest in blogging, few hard numbers are available about the extent of the phenomenon, particularly in languages other than English. The NITLE Blog Census is an attempt to create and share a regularly updated database of all known weblogs.

The census has been active since early May, 2003.

Our crawlers search the Web for weblogs, and attempt to categorize them by language and authoring tool. Data gathered during the census is archived every two weeks, and is available for non-commercial use. Our software respects the usual robots.txt exclusion rules. If you do not wish your weblog to be included in our surveys, please contact the site maintainer and we will expunge your site from our records.

About NITLE

NITLE is the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, a non-profit national consortium supported by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, and dedicated to helping liberal arts colleges make effective use of technology. NITLE was one of the first academic organizations to take an interest in weblogs, and continues to see them as a valuable tool for sharing knowledge.

NITLE has also been active in finding applications for advanced algorithms in information retrieval. Because of its size and dynamic nature, the blogosphere makes an excellent test collection for NITLE's search technologies. Data gathered from the blog census helps us test and improve our search tools.

NITLE is not affiliated with any blog tool provider or service. We welcome suggestions for improving the quality of our data and our methodology. We especially welcome pointers to pockets of active weblogs that our crawler may not have found yet.

Please address any questions about the NITLE web crawl to the site maintainer.