Wait, How Many Blogs Again?

David Sifry has released Technorati's latest "State of the Blogosphere" report today. Sifry's post tells us that Technorati is now tracking more than 70 million blogs. That's up from 51 million at their last report. He also points out that new blogs are coming online at the rate of 120,000 per day (or roughly 1.4 blogs per second.) Unfortunately, spam blogs are also coming online at a pretty strong rate. Technorati tracked the creation of more than 11,000 spam blogs (splogs) per day in the month of December.

Interestingly, February was the strongest month of blog growth since last fall, seeing the launch of more than 113,000 blogs per day. By comparison, December saw just 83,000 blogs per day. While those numbers are impressive, they do signal a slight slowing in blog growth. After years of seeing the number of blogs double every six months, Technorati notes that it took 320 days (more than ten months) for the most recent doubling. Blog activity is slowing it's growth rate as well.

We also see a slowing in growth in the rate of posts created per day; while there are spikes in blog posts during times of significant world crisis -- for instance, last summer’s conflict between Israel and Hezbollah -- the overall trend is that posting volume is growing more slowly, at about 1.5 million postings per day. That's about 17 posts per second. In October 2006, Technorati was tracking about 1.3 million postings per day, about 15 posts per second.

If you'd like to dig further into information about the language of blogs, the frequency of posts, the use of tags and quite a bit of other juicy tidbits, check out Sifry's full post. If not, then here's a handy summary that he offers up at the end of the post:

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or...
• 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or...
• 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%
• Italian fourth at 3%
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February