Technorati’s Dave Sifry has issued his State of the Blogosphere for August 2006. It’s the usual story of the number of blogs growing at an incredible pace – a new one every two seconds (about 8% of those are spam blogs).
Sifry provides a slide (below: click to enlarge) that looks at the 30 websites with the most inbound links (according to technorati):
What’s it show? Well, the New York Times is the most linked to mainstream media website, accumulating just under 80,000 inbound links.
British sites fare well, with the BBC in 6th place with 45,000 inbound links and the Guardian and Times at 14th and 19th respectively. For the Guardian that ranking certainly represents punching way above it’s weight, or at least above where you’d expect it based on print circulation figures.
Interestingly, only two blogs appear in the top 30 sites for inbound links although the picture does change slightly when looking at the top 90, where 11 (12.2%) are blogs. Sifry thinks this is a good showing for blogs, given the "budget differential. I disagree because I would have thought that blogs, with all their outbound links, would actually fare better than they did – but it seems that bloggers are still happy to link to mainstream media sites and the commercial blogs, even if they aren’t getting links back.