A month ago, I posted commentary on the rising influence and rapid growth of weblogs.
That post included comment on how many blogs Technorati tracks and what blog growth looked like. I quoted figures from Technorati as at the end of July when Technorati reported it tracked 3 million blogs. When I posted my commentary on 13 September, the then figure was over 3.8 million blogs – an increase of nearly 30%.
Technorati’s CEO David Sifry has provided some new figures on what’s been happening since then.
Today, Technorati tracks over 4.1 million blogs – up 10% on a month ago. In fact, according to Sifry, growth in blogs tracked by Technorati has been doubling at a regular pace, and the blogosphere (definition) is now more than 8 times as large as it was in June 2003. In addition, the slowest rate at which the blogosphere has doubled in size is once every 5 months.
Those statistics reflect the dramatic growth curve over the past 18 months, which looks like this at left (click for larger image).
Sifry says there are about 12,000 new weblogs being created each day, which means that on average, a new blog is created every 7.4 seconds. Not all blogs are regularly posted to, though – about 45% of all older blogs have not had a post in 3 months, according to Sifry. This may be due to abandonment, hosting service switches, tyre kicking, or other factors.