State of the Blogosphere

Dave Sifry has another update from Technorati on the state of the blogosphere.

In summary:

• Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
• The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
• Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
• From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.
• 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.
• About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.
• About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.
• Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.
• This is about double the volume of about a year ago.
• The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time

Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, August 2006

Now, what I find even more insightful is his questioning of whether the blogosphere can continue to grow at doubling every 6 months. How do we define blogs, though? Anything that generates an RSS feed? Is a podcast? A videocast? I know that at Castfire, we routinely work with blogging engines for our podcast and videocast rollouts. At WordCamp, there were multiple discussions on using Wordpress as the engine for websites -- even those that don't appear as blogs. Are these counted in the growth?

It reiterates my belief that the lines between blog and website are becoming blurred. If someone were to ask, I refer them to my website and not my blog. When I read the Chronicle, the differentiation between article and blog post is in style not engine used.