Since we’re back on the horse now (as in, back in the saddle, not back on heroin), Media Orchard realized we had a bit of catching up to do on all the marketing and PR blogs out there. And what better way to catch up with marketing blogs than to track their relative levels of Web 2.0 buzzword use and/or abuse.

So we decided to take a list of Web 2.0 buzzwords and enter them in the search engines of 40-or-so marketing bloggers to determine the number of instances each blog used one of the buzzwords. To level the playing field a bit between older and newer blogs, we counted only the period from January 2006 to the present.

We’ll present the results of our research one buzzword at a time over a series of posts — building up to a deafening crescendo with a comprehensive Web 2.0 Buzzword Abuse Index, incorporating all results to determine which marketing blogger uses or abuses buzzwords the most.

For our first report, we’ll disclose the results for — what else? — the buzzword “Web 2.0.”

We found that the selected blogs used this buzzword a median of 14 times during the period (about once per month), so we set that as “1″ in the index and gave everyone else a score based on that average. The higher the score, the greater the use/abuse of the buzzword “Web 2.0.”

The results:

Steve Rubel is the biggest user/abuser of “Web 2.0″ by a wide margin — using the term an average of three times per week, more than twice as often as the nearest challenger. In Steve’s defense, he does post more frequently, and has more of a tech focus, than most other marketing bloggers.

The full rundown:

Micro Persuasion: 13.9
Marketing Profs Daily Fix: 5.7
Online Marketing Blog: 3.8
PR 2.0: 3.3
Seth’s Blog: 2.6
a shel of my former self: 2.6
Marketing Pilgrim: 2.4
NevilleHobson.com: 2.4
Media Orchard: 2.4
Pronet Advertising: 2.1
Diva Marketing Blog: 1.8
BlogWrite for CEOs: 1.4
The Flack: 1.4
Adrants: 1.3
Communication Overtones: 1.3
POP! PR Jots: 1.2
Emergence Marketing: 1.2
What’s Next Blog: 1.1
Duct Tape Marketing: 1.1
Open the Dialogue: 1.1
Strive Notes: 1.1
Church of the Customer: 1.0
jaffe juice: 1.0
PR Squared: 1.0
Chaos Scenario: 0.9
Copyblogger: 0.8
Beyond Madison Avenue: 0.7
Todd And - The Power to Connect: 0.7
Bad Language: 0.7
Blogging Me Blogging You: 0.6
Brand Autopsy: 0.6
MIT Advertising Lab: 0.5
Brand Sizzle: 0.5
Make the Logo Bigger: 0.4
Copywrite, Ink.: 0.4
The Copywriting Maven: 0.3
Marketing Begins at Home: 0.3
Into PR: 0.2
Presto Vivace Blog: 0.2
Brand Noise: 0.2
On Message from Wagner Communications: 0.2
adgoodness: 0.1
The Buzz Bin: 0.1
Common Sense PR: 0.1
Marketing Whore: 0.1
Occam’s RazR: 0.1

If you’re not on this list, we’re sorry — our fingers got sore. But please feel free to put your own blog’s results in comments.

Overall, we were surprised how seldom many marketing bloggers use the term. Of course, a number of you may have gotten off easy because your search engines didn’t return all the results they should have.

Running the same query on different blogs really makes you appreciate blogs with good search. We were particularly impressed by the ExpressionEngine-powered search used by Shel Holtz and a few others. We also noticed that some slackers who shall remain nameless don’t even have a search engine on their blogs.

Next up: “Mashup”.