The IULM University in Milan has recently carried out a research on the Italian blogosphere, with 600 online interviews. Italian bloggers are mainly young: 40% are students, 20% employees and 15% self-employed. Half of them are "mature" bloggers active for more than 6 months, while 9% are newbies who have just started blogging.

Italian bloggers are frequently online to search for information. The majority of those interviewed updates the blog at least three times per week, and 21% declares of writing on a daily basis. In addition, 65% of bloggers reads the blogs listed on his sidebar, 31% those of his friends, and 55% those of his readers.

The main blogging platforms are the following ones (april 2005):

Splinder: 114.695 blogs
Excite Blog: 15.078 blogs
Bloggers.it: 10.853 blogs
Tim i.blog (moblog): 8.703 blogs
il Cannocchiale: 8.286 blogs
Aruba: 4.820 blogs
iobloggo.com: 4.630 blogs

The following platforms do not release their figures: Digiland Blog, Clarence/superEva, DiaBLOGando, Blogs.it (Radio Userland), Tiscali Blog, Virgilio Blog and Leonardo. It is also difficult to estimate how many blogs in Italian are based on international platforms like Blogger or TypePad.

The Italian blogosphere grows at a 5% monthly rate, which is dramatically low in comparison with other countries, but - on the contrary - is rather high if you consider that Italy is one of the European countries where Internet penetration amongst individuals is lower.