IP Democracy: Technorati's Sifry: 100,000 New Blogs Every Day

Technorati’s Dave Sifry has posted his latest “State of the Blogosphere” report and the data he presents depict a robust and still-growing blogosphere. Growth has slowed somewhat, although Technorati claims to be cracking down even more on the inclusion of junk “splogs” in its index.

Technorati is currently tracking 57 million blogs, with 100,000 new blogs created every day in October, down from the peak of 160,000 new blogs every day in June 2006, although Sifry stresses that the boom in splogs, which Technorati now more carefully weeds out, may have been driving the higher growth numbers in June.

About 55% of the 57 million blogs are “active,” meaning they’ve been updated at least once in three months, with the number of aggregate postings per day around 1.3 million.

Sifry adds an interesting twist to his usual analysis by looking at the characteristics of blogs based on their Technorati level of “authority.” (Technorati assigns “authority” rankings to blogs based on the number of links each blog receives. Low authority is 3 to 9 incoming links while high authority is 500+ or more incoming links, with two additional levels of authority between these two extremes.) Not surprisingly, the highest authority blogs are the oldest (530 days) and have the highest number of postings (on average 53 per month).

Fascinating stuff, but it would be great if Sifry offered some bigger picture thoughts on what it all means, aside from the fact that blogging is still growing at a scorching pace. What else has grown at such a torrid rate, climbing from zero to fifty-seven million in little more than three years? Not much of anything that I can think of, really.

Certainly the number of web pages, the number of URLs and other key Internet metrics have grown at this fast a clip, but those statistics don’t count because they’re meaningless — e.g. any web site can have countless pages, most of which might contain nothing of value. But blogs represent voices, individual, and in many cases corporate, voices that presumably want to say something. It’s an amazing phenomenon, that’s for sure.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on November 6, 2006 2:50 PM to IP Democracy