14 DAY TRIAL // The blog-tracking site Technorati has released a set of statistics for the status of the blog environment in August 2006, while updating the numbers from a similar report dated three months ago. Technorati's survey metrics indicate an ascendant tendency over the span of the past three years, the blogosphere doubling its size every six months. This accelerated growth ration translates in a blogosphere volume 100 times larger than it was in 2003, and is equivalent to in excess of 50 million tracked weblogs.
"Back in November of 2003, the blogosphere had doubled in size in 40 days - probably because Technorati was new and was just picking up all of the blogs that were out there in the world. In January of 2004, the blogosphere was doubling at a rate of once ever 120 days, which is about once every 4 months. By July of 2004, the blogosphere was doubling every 180 days, or about once every 6 months. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months. That means things have slowed somewhat - the rate of doubling has increased by about half a month to once every seven months," reveals Technorati CEO Dave Sifry in the Technorati report.
Technorati also discovered that starting July 2006, each passing day sees the birth of approximately 175,000 new weblogs, which translates into 7,200 new blogs per hour or more than 2 blogs per second. The blog-tracking site revealed that it identifies a total of 8% of spam blogs, or splogs, with Technorati dropping from indexation over 70% of its received pings from already confirmed spam sources.
The posting volume of the blogosphere is also on the rise, increasing to the 1.6 million milestone per day, meaning 18.6 posts per second. As for the blogosphere's language demarcation lines, the Technorati's report indicates that: "in June 39% of all postings tracked by Technorati were in English, 31% in Japanese, and 12% in Chinese."