Hey folks, the wrap up is now online where the homepage used to be - http://blogactionday.org - take a look, there’s plenty of interesting stats, quotes, posts, links and more. Of course it’s only a tiny fraction of what happened, but fascinating nonetheless.

Also we have a winner for our guess-how-many-participants competition, and it is Aparecido Jose do Rosario of http://crazyseawolf.blogspot.com, congratulations!! I’ve just sent off an email so we can sort out the prize, the competition was incredibly close with the runner up being just 6 minutes over the deadline.

Anyhow I’ll update this blog one or two more times over the next year, but most likely the next time you’ll hear from me is in 2008. Until then thank you all so much for being a part of Blog Action Day. It would not have been possible without the thousands of bloggers out there who made this event what it was - a mammoth success!

Thank you!

Well it’s the last few hours of the inaugural Blog Action Day, as I write this it’s 9:30pm in Honolulu and soon the last countries will have ticked over to October 16th.

It’s been an amazing day and I think we as bloggers can really say we shook up the internet. During the final day the blog participation count shot up and it’s just 50 shy of a whopping 20,000 bloggers. With 2.5 hrs left, you never know a few late stragglers may still register which would make for a nice final tally.

Tomorrow I will be switching the site over to a post-Blog Action Day wrap up site which will highlight some of the amazing achievements of the day, so you can look forward to seeing that. I’ll be sending out an email to everyone as well to say thank you and sign off for 2007.

And then I shall go and sleep for a very, very long time!

We’re about half way through the day now (taking the many time zones into account) and the blog posts are pouring out. From Google’s Blog Search I can see that there have been close to 5,000 blogs that have been indexed which have the words “Blog Action Day” in the post during the last 24 hours, and no doubt plenty more still on their way as we head into European and American daylight and evening hours.

The best way to see what a huge impact we’re making is thanks to BlogPulse a service which measures trends around the blogosphere. Here is a graph for the words Blog Action Day and the phrase “Blog Action Day” appearing:

I’m looking forward to seeing how that graph ends tomorrow, that’s for sure!

Another day, another few blogs joining. Most recently we say hello to Entrepreneurs-journey, LifeClever, Happiness-Project and a number of others. The list has rapidly outgrown the sidebar of this little blog, but fortunately help is at hand. Ryan - our developer star - is putting together the registration form and db for the new site today and it will all be up in less than 48 hours so that we can stop manually counting numbers and let it all happen automagically.

Leo and I are also compiling information for the main site, a list of official blog action day charities, press releases to send out on Wednesday and plenty of other admin. Additionally we’ve been fortunate enough to get a short promo video made for us which will help make the site feel a little more dynamic, courtesy of Cyan of FreelanceSwitch.

Finally I’ve just bumped up the hosting for this site to double it’s bandwidth and specs in preparation for this week’s traffic fest, and on Dharmesh Shah of OnStartups sage advice am changing the URL to ‘.org’ to drill home the non-profit-y-ness of the initiative.

So onwards and upwards. The next post here will be on launch day!

That’s right folks, the sixth biggest blog on the planet has just committed to participating in Blog Action Day! With a readership numbering in the hundreds of thousands, this vaults our ‘reach’ well above half a million. We are looking into other ways of measuring such things, possibly using Alexa or Compete. The main reason is to create a number that excites everyone and helps them see the huge possibilities of what we can do together!

Along with Lifehacker, we’re happy to welcome a number of other top blogs to the initiative, and all of a sudden that list in the sidebar is starting to burgeon out of control. Fortunately we’re less than a week away from launching the main site complete with registration forms and counters!

I think we can officially say the prelaunch campaign is going to be a success. Overnight many more blogs committed to participating including a number out of Technorati’s famed top 100 list. Blogs like GigaOm, Pronet Advertising and Dumb Little Man as well as plenty of other great, well known blogs.

We haven’t got readership numbers for all the blogs, but just from the ones I can track down, this puts Blog Action Day’s reach in excess of 200,000. That is a lot of people and I don’t think anyone can dispute that mixed in that group are some of tomorrow’s leaders, captains of business and great men and women. The chance to get a discussion of environmental issues from so many different viewpoints with not just these great minds, but all the readerships is unique.

Momentum is definitely growing.

It is a difficult thing to pin down the readership of a blog, between casual visitors, regular visitors, subscribers and of course people who read the feed in some other context such as an aggregator. Since it is useful however to be able to say roughly what sort of reach the blogs participating in Blog Action Day have, we’ve decided to use Feedburner RSS numbers as a yardstick.

Today with the addition of another few blogs committing to participate - like the fabulous technology blog AJAX Magazine and master blogger Chris Garrett - the prelaunch campaign has yielded almost a dozen blogs with a total subscriber reach of 59,184! This is fantastic news as we are only a couple days in, eagerly awaiting replies from many more blogs. I hope to see that number go far, far higher.

It’s been 24 hours since we began our official prelaunch campaign. For the next 8 days we are contacting some of the most influential, established and well recognized blogs on the planet. Getting some big names is essential to giving Blog Action Day the momentum it needs right out of the gate.

Blogs are beginning to trickle in already with affirmative answers coming from SEOMoz - one of the most well respected search blogs out there, DailyBlogTips - a growing blog about blogging and a handful of other great sites.

It’s still early days and prior to the August 15th launch of the site and initiative we aren’t doing any marketing other than invitations, but we’re off to auspicious start.

Naturally in true blogger fashion, we had to begin the initiative with our own blog - the Action Blog - which will act as a bit of a hub for the next two months of work. In future years the RSS feed coming out of this blog will serve as a good wake up call every August when it’s time to begin a new years campaign.

So that’s it for now, if you are a blogger and stumbled here somehow, or if you know bloggers who’d be interested in joining the Blog Action Day initiative, don’t hesitate to contact us.