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State of the blogosphere, October 2006

Daily posting volume

There are at least 57 million blogs in the world, reports blog trackers Technorati. And the number of blogs is doubling every 236 days, although that’s a somewhat slower growth rate than a few months ago.

And just in case you think those are mostly blogs which have fallen into neglect, 55 per cent of them are considered by Technorati to be “active”, having been updated at least once in the past three months

These and many other fascinating facts are in Technorati chief executive Dave Sifry’s quarterly State of the Blogosphere report.

Here are a few more highlights which I’ll quote verbatim:

    • Spam-, splog– and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.
    • About 100,000 new weblogs were created each day, again down slightly quarter-over-quarter but probably due in part to spam fighting efforts.
    • The globalization of the blogosphere continues. Our data appears to show both English and Spanish languages are a more universal blog language than the other two most dominant language, Japanese and Chinese, which seem to be more regionally localized.
    • Coincident with a rise in blog posts about escalating Middle East tensions throughout the summer and fall [that’s northern hemisphere summer and autumn], Farsi has moved into the top 10 languages of the blogosphere, indicating that blogging continues to play a critical role in debates about the important issues of our times.

    With 57 million competitors, most bloggers dream of breaking into the Technorati Top 100.