The actual size of the Iraqi blogosphere.

It really surprises me sometimes that almost nobody knows the real size of the Iraqi blogosphere, and that even includes many Iraqi bloggers.

Yesterday my friend Zeyad expressed frustration by the little number of Iraqi blogs:

We also discussed where the Iraqi blogosphere stands in the midst of these developments. Iraq Blog Count lately counted its 212th Iraqi blog, which can be somewhat impressive, given that there were only 4 Iraqi blogs before October 2003, just before the launch of the second wave of Iraqi bloggers, which added exponentially to the growth of the Iraqi blogosphere.

But still, looking at Sifry’s [Technorati] data, one cannot help but wonder: is that all we can offer to the blogosphere? 212 Iraqi blogs?

The fact is, those 212 blogs listed here are only the tip on an iceberg as the mass of the Iraqi blogosphere remains unseen and grows below the surface and that's mostly because this mass is almost entirely written in Arabic and thus receives little if any global attention, although this may look like a weakness, it also means these Arabic-written have greater impact inside Iraq.

Now if you click here (and if you know Arabic of course) you'll see a list that stretches for more than 110 blogs that are not listed on Iraq blog count.

I was involved in the development of that service and the webmaster in charge of it is actually a friend of mine so I asked him for more details and here's what I got:

Total Number of Users: 1558
Total Number of Posts: 13458
Total Number of visits to all community members: 9 920 393

And knowing that this community was created on 15 Jan 2005, i.e. only 18 months old makes these statistics impressive in my opinion.

It's true that not all those 1 558 blogs are active ones but that also applies to the other 212 as it does to the 50 million blogs worldwide.

So to be accurate we should say that 212+1558= 1770 is the total number of Iraqi blogs as of now…Now that sounds better!