Wow, what an explosive growth in new weblogs (”blogs”) over the last few months! David Sifry and Technorati, the (self-annointed) “authority on what’s going on in the world of weblogs” have crunched the numbers to provide a high-level overview on the expansion of the blogosphere, both in terms of numbers of bloggers, as well as in the growth of new blogs per day.

• Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005. This includes blogs hosted on MSN Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, AOL Journals, as well as a number of international hosted services. Use of software like WordPress and Movable Type to provide blogs continues to grow significantly as well.
• The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months. A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
• About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year. About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly
• Weekends tend to be slower posting days by about 5-10% of the weekly averages.
  During the day, posting tends to peak between the hours of 7AM and noon Pacific time (10AM - 3PM Eastern time)

David further pointed out that posting volume has followed a strong upward trend. “After a brief dip last winter, the average rate of postings has grown steadily such that at the end of July 2005, there were about 900,000 posts created each day. That’s about 37,500 posts every hour, or 10.4 posts per second. It peaked at just over 1.1 Million posts per day after the Live 8 concerts and Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her resignation from the US Supreme Court.”