ON CONTINUING GROWTH OF BLOGS
UP, UP AND AWAY
Dave Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, has another quarterly update on the state of the blogging 
- "Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
- The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
- It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
- 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
- Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour"
Also encouraging is that more of these new bloggers are staying with it after the first three months of setting up a blog, as David explains:
"...19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. That's an increase both absolute and relative terms over just 3 months ago, when only 50.5% or 13.7 million blogs were active. In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging continues to grow as a habitual activity."
There are some other interesting stats and graphs in his post, including a discussion of spam-enabled blog sites (aka SPLOGS). I'd recommend reading the full post if you have an interest in the topic.
As follow-up questions, I posted the following as a comment to David's post:
"...I'm wondering how the composition and the readership of the Technorati 100 has changed in the last few quarters. It'd be interesting to see those growth stats relative to that of the overall blog universe.
Second, it'd be interesting to understand how the categories are diversifying as the absolute number of blogs grow, i.e., which categories are the new blogs in the last quarter are focusing on vs. the new blogs in the previous quarter and/or last year.
Also numbers on how the use of Technorati tags might provide a window into the mainstreaming (or not) of tagging in general..."
I'm including the comment here in case any of you have additional insight into these questions. Thanks.
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