Japanese Are Most Prolific Bloggers in Asia

by Jon Russell

Monday, June 07, 2010 at 06:56 AM EDT

As blogged on my Asian Correspondent page over the weekend, research from social media measurement agency Sysomos has indicated the Japanese are Asia's most active bloggers

Having researched and analysed the global blogsphere, Sysomos ranks Japan third globally with a 4.88% share of voice.

The report, which lists the top fifteen blogging nations, includes only India (12th with 2.14%) and Malaysia (14th with 1.7%) from Asia though APAC neighbour Australia is ranked eleventh (with a 2.22% share of voice).

Thailand fails to feature in the ranking, perhaps unsurprisingly as the list mirrors Sysomos research on Twitter from earlier this year (as blogged here and here) which ranked Thailand in 25th overall.

Professor Michael Netzley over at CommunicateAsia has done a nice job combining the two sets of findings from Sysomos to produce the quick glance chart below which shows Asia's most vocal Twitterers and bloggers.

Michael also points out a couple of important factors that are important to bear in mind when digesting these results.

First, the two reports were released approximately six months apart, so there was a siginificant time differences between data collection efforts.

Second, we are given percentages only and no raw numbers, so there is no way to weight this data by population or total number of netizens in each country.

Finally, the reports appear to have been released as a sort of white paper/blog marketing effort in support of Sysomos. While corporate marketing is in no way an inherently a bad thing, the lack of raw numbers, transparency about research methodology, and more means we should read the data more conservatively.

Personally, I'm interested to see that China does not feature in the blogging ranking (its low global Twitter ranking comes because the service is blocked in the country). Just like Twitter, blogging platforms like blogger.com, wordpress and typepad have suffered from government censorship, a likely reason for the country's absence.

While Malaysia continues to score highly given its relatively modest population of 26 million people (for example Thailand has more than 65 million), adding its impressive blogosphere ranking to those of Twitter and Facebook.

That Indonesia, Asia's biggest Twitter user, fails to rank is also surprising. Perhaps the popularity of Twitter has eaten into the country's blogger numbers, or Twitter has simply attracted ‘new' people to the world of new media and social networking. I defer opinion to someone with greater country-specific knowledge.

This article originally appeared on Jon Russell: Social Media In Thailand.