The State of the Blogosphere for February 2006 has been released. Of course, it relates more to the blogs that the search engine / aggregator Technorati tracks than the sum total of blogs in the world, but it still makes interesting reading.
The service is now tracking more than 50,000 blog posts every hour; as David Sifry rightly notes, “it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject, and 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.”
As the graph above shows, the number of weblogs tracked has been doubling every five months. Again, this will partially be to do woth Technorati’s changing algorithms and server capacity. But at the same time, a lot of this will be genuine growth; we’re seeing blogging increase as a legitimate way of publishing content.
It’s understandable: unlike a lot of formats, blogging separates content from structure. Okay, there’s the chronological ordering, but that’s more of a convenience of viewing rather than a fully imposed framework; you can always click on a tag to cut through and view posts on a particular topic. All bloggers have to do to publish is write. One button and it’s out there; a collection of notes, effectively sitting in the void, waiting for someone to read them as they’re written or for their author to later string them into a narrative of some sort. No coding, programming, uploading or faffing required. I think, as a result, we’ll see blog growth for some time to come.
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