Sifry's State of The Blogosphere!

Wow, this is fascinating stuff. Ever since hearing Dave Sifry's October state of the blogosphere on IT Conversations I've been dying to hear the updates and here it is. Amazing. Some of the points.

-technorati now tracks 7.8 million blogs and 937 million links, double the number it tracked 5 months ago in Oct. 2004

-the number of blogs has been doubling aprox. every 5 months for the last 20 months, which means it has increased in size 16 times since Dave started tracking it

-30,000 to 40,000 (NEW) weblogs each day!

-but all is not rosey - the popularity has produced "link farm" which are fake blogs used to drive traffic... blog spam...

-20% of pings technoratti gets are false pings from spam blogs

note: This is where it's gets very interesting to me, since blogging is so transparent google and technorati have been very effective at quickly identifying and blocking 90% of blog spam, it's still a dangerous game and could spin wildly out of control still, but so far the transparency of the medium has proven resilient.

-what's expected next: the big news on the big indicators: readership and the volume of posts which really reflect the growth of the blogosphere a whole lot more accurately, his last report from Oct, stated that readership was outgrowing new readership by huge bounds, great news for bloggers everywhere. We're not just talking to ourselves here. Can't wait for the update!

Below is an excerpt from his post, preserved here for posterity's sake. Be sure to read the original at: Sifry's Alerts: State of The Blogosphere, March 2005, Part 1: Growth of Blogs

"It's been 5 months since my first presentation on the State of the Blogosphere at the Web 2.0 conference, which I later posted in parts. A lot has happened, and its time for an update on what's going on in the world of weblogs, and to have a look at the numbers.

I'll be posting this in a number of parts, as there's a lot of information to cover. Today, I'll be focusing on the macro growth of the blogosphere, both in the aggregate number of bloggers out there, as well as the growth of the number of new blogs per day. Here's the chart of the aggregate growth of the blogosphere from March 2003 to February 2005 (compare this chart with the one from October 2004):

Technorati is now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links. That's just about double the number of weblogs tracked in October 2004. In fact, the blogosphere is doubling in size about once every 5 months. It has already done so at this pace four times, which means that in the last 20 months, the blogosphere has increased in size by over 16 times"