Technorati just released a report detailing the growth of the blogosphere. They found that a new web log was created every second, totaling 80,000 new blogs every day. Even more interesting was the rise of moblogging (blogging from your phone). Let’s just hope a moblogger isn’t behind you when you’re sitting at a red light.
That rate of new blog creation has spurred a doubling of the total blogosphere every 5.5 months, with just over half of them regularly updated. Only 13% were updated on a weekly basis, which many of the 14.2 million blogs and counting are neglected or abandoned once begun.
But that’s not to say the other half is dropping the ball. Technorati reports that about 900,000 blog posts are created daily, or to be precise, about 10.4 blog posts per second. Most of the blog posts are created during weekday business hours, between 10AM and 3PM EST. The number of weekend blogo-warriors remains low, and the volume of posts on average is 5-10% less than weekday posts.
The growth of the blog is largely attributed to the ease of publication made possible by services such as MSN Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, and AOL Journals. Software like WordPress and Movable Type have also aided in the blogsplosion (since we’re making up words daily around here).
So what is everybody blogging about? Technorati noted significant spikes in the blogosphere when major worldwide news hit the wire. Topics like the Indian Ocean tsunami, Live8, the London bombings create a strong ripple effect among blogs.
Take, for example, the marked spike in discussion of the London bombings when compared to more static topics like the Iraq War and Supreme Court nominations. Or the popular culture sector, compare the Michael Jackson verdict with Martha Stewart and Angelina Jolie.
The rise of the blog is not without its own liability issues, however. People are finding out often that posting content to a blog on the wild west-like Internet, comes with “real world” limitations. E-Commerce Times has a nice write up of copyright issues, Fair Use, and web logs. Or check out this soldier’s demotion after outing classified information on his military blog.
