The Web publishing phenomenon known as the blogsphere has millions of sites but only a small number gain significant audiences, according to data released on Friday.
Just 60 sites are "hot," defined as attracting more than 5,000 subscriber links.
Sites that attract 1,000 or more subscriber links number only 437, according to AskJeeves' Bloglines, the most popular system among Web users for actively monitoring other sites.
The universe of Weblogs or blog-related Web sites -- various estimates put the number of such sites between 14 million and 20 million -- is referred to as the blogsphere or blogosphere.
Syndicated sites that "really matter" -- classified as sites that have at least 20 other sites linking to them -- number 36,930, according to September data from Bloglines.
Sites "that matter" -- defined as having at least one link from another site -- number nearly 1.4 million sites.
Only one site -- popular geek programmer site Slashdot (
http://slashdot.org/) -- has drawn more than 50,000 subscribers, according to Bloglines data.