RAPID GROWTH OF THE BLOGOSPHERE

Dave Sifry put up the most recent numbers reflecting the rapid growth of the blogosphere:

The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.

New blog creation continues to grow. We currently track over 75,000 new weblogs created every day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every second of every day - and 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created. In other words, even though there's a reasonable amount of tire-kicking going on, blogging is growing as a habitual activity. In October of 2005, when Technorati was only tracking 19 million blogs, about 10.4 million bloggers were still posting 3 months after the creation of their blogs.

In addition to that, about 2.7 million bloggers update their blogs at least weekly. (full post)

CNet's view on these numbers:

According to the blog trackers at Technorati, a company that indexes and searches blog postings, the number of blogs online is doubling about every five and a half months .

As of Monday, the company is tracking more than 27 million separate blogs around the world, or about 60 times what was online three years ago. About 2.7 million of those blogs are updated at least weekly, with about 1.2 million total posts appearing per day, Technorati founder David Sifry said in his "State of the Blogosphere" post on Monday.

"At that rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject," Sifry wrote. "A new challenge has presented itself--how to make sense out of this monstrous conversation, and how to find the most interesting and authoritative information out there." (full post)