Sifry Reports on the State of the Blogosphere: August 2006

Staggering Growth with some twists to the mix!

Another quarter has come and gone since the last Technorati report, and although the growth of the blogosphere has begun to slow somewhat the numbers are still staggering. Sifry (Technorati CEO) writes:

From January 2004 until July 2006, almost two and a half years later, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months. Can this possibly continue? Will I be posting about the 100 Millionth blog tracked in February of 2007? I can’t imagine that things will continue at this blistering pace - it has got to slow down. After all, that would mean that there will be more bloggers around in 7 months than there are bloggers around in total today. I shake my head as I am writing this - the only thing still niggling at my brain is that I’d have been perfectly confident making the same statement 7 months ago when we had tracked our 25 Millionth blog, and I’ve just proven myself wrong… As of July 2006, about 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.

Extraordinary! Sifry acknowledges that some of the numbers represent spam blogs, although he believes their filters are stopping most of them.

My first thought was the explosion of Chinese blogs could account for the incredible growth, but according to Sifry “English has retaken the lead as the #1 language of the blogosphere… however, it’s not by much - the Japanese blogosphere has grown substantially as well.

Another interesting tidbit is that most of the posting is done during business hours pacific time. So instead of congregating at the office water cooler, bloggers are gathering around their favorite newsreader.

In Summary:

For the serious blogger this means competition to be heard above the noise is becoming all that more difficult. It’s getting harder every day to stake out ‘my space‘ within the blogosphere (pun intended). So maybe those filters aren’t such a bad idea after all ;-).

HELLO! CAN YOU HEAR ME NOW? Bloke out.