Blogosphere Doubles Every Six Months

By Ed Oswald, BetaNews

February 7, 2006, 3:40 PM

If you think everyone and their mother has a blog these days, you're probably right. Web log aggregator Technorati released details of a study Monday that showed that the site now tracks some 27.2 million Web logs across the Web.

The site indexes 75,000 new Web logs every day, an average of one every second. The percentage of those bloggers still updating their sites three months after its creation remained about the same at a little over 50 percent. It also found that at least 2.7 million of them update their Web logs at least once a week.

However the blogosphere's success has not been without problems. With the increase in blogging activity a spike in spam on blogs has also occurred. "About 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud," Technorati's Dave Sifry wrote in the company Web log.

Technorati said it is working with partners to keep spam blogs at a minimum, and would be attending a Web spam summit this spring with other key industry players.

Beyond spam, the site tracks some 1.2 million posts per day, or 50,000 per hour. Sifry said this has posed a new challenge for Technorati and its users, where it has become harder to sift through the sea of posts to find interesting and authoritative information.

The service's tagging feature has also gained broad acceptance by bloggers, with some 400,000 tagged posts indexed per day. Over 81 million posts have been tagged since the company first introduced the service last January.

"There was still a major problem, however - how to easily find the most interesting blogs on the subjects that you cared about," Sifry wrote. Thus in September the service launched Blog Finder, which is essentially tagging for blogs.

"In 4 months, over 850,000 blogs have been put into Blog Finder, making it the most comprehensive directory of blogs on the Web," he added.