Bill Tancer from Hitwise and David Sifry from Technorati covered some very interesting data about the participatory web at this mornings Web 2.0 Expo keynote.

This whole participatory web stuff is just in its infancy. In the last year or so there has been an explosion in the use of sites like YouTube, Wikipedia and Photobucket by the mass audience. No longer is Web 2.0 the domain of the uber web elite.

Of those people using participatory sites the vast majority of users still seem to be lurking with only a fraction of those users actually contributing to the content. Looking at Flickr and YouTube, way less than 1% of users actually upload content while the vast majority of people out there consume. Wikipedia enjoyed a slightly larger percentage (4.59%) of users who interacted with the content but for many, the web is still a consumption platform. Beyond the low number of participants, the really interesting data focused on who the participants actually are. Unlike the prevailing perceptions, the vast majority of people who actually contribute to participatory sites appear to be in an older age demographic than many people would first assume. The hypothesis presented was that this is the latest evolution of the older/wiser generation educating the youth of today. If you are between the ages of 35-55 years old you’re prime for contributing and editing Wikipedia content .

Beyond participatory sites, blogs and blogging are showing some impressive stats as well. Technorati is seeing 120,000 new blogs per day and tracking over 15.3 million active blogs out of a total of 70 million+ installed instances. Blogs have become so main stream that 20%+ of the top 100 sites right now are run off of blogging infrastructure even though many of them may not appear to be your everyday white label blog. Even more interesting is the fact that Japanese appears to have taken the lead as the preferred language of blogging as it accounts for 37% of all blogs at the moment. Even though this all seems daunting, the other interesting piece of data highlighted that 88% of the top 100 blogs are different than those from a year ago. If nothing else, the blogosphere is extremely fluid and still a very active place to be.

Read/Write Web was live blogging it and have all the stats over there…