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Blog growth continues at staggering rate

David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, released his latest state of the blogosphere. Blog growth continues at a staggering rate.

Blog growth.jpg

  • Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs
  • The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half 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
  • 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
  • Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives
  • Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated
  • Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour
  • Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day
  • Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers.

And we still have folks telling law firms and professional services businesses that blogs are over-hyped and a fad. What are those guys smoking?

  • John

    But how many of those blogs will actually be viable in a year, a month, heck, even a day? Many blogs that are tracked have only one or two posts. So your argument that because a lot of blogs have been created, blogs are therefore not a fad, is weak. Indeed, that so many people have built a blog might be evidence that blogging is a fad. Can we say pet rock?

  • http://www.lexblog.com Kevin O'Keefe

    The growth of blogs is certainly evidence they're not a fad. And in the professional services arena, those publishing blogs are not dropping them.
    From 2002 through April of last year 85% of lawyer blogs started were still going strong. You can check my source at:
    http://kevin.lexblog.com/advantages-of-lawyer-blogs-989-85-of-blogs-started-by-lawyers-still-going-strong.html
    Sure there will be blogs that will fade off. But in professional services businesses, where people such as lawyers market with their intellectual capital, blogs generate work. People tend not to stop doing things that generate business.
    In addition, larger businesses, such as large law firms, have always distributed newsletters and alerts by hard copy or email. They've found distributing that information via blogs not only more effective, but also a huge cost savings. They are not going to stop using blogs.
    There were those who said the telephone was a fad and that professionals would not never use it. People said the same of websites.
    Not sure why blogs draw so many nay-sayers. It's probably a combination of the word 'blog' sounding strange and people never having used a blog for networking giving negative opinions about blogs.