blogosphere - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

Blog search engine Technorati has just released its annual State of the Blogosphere report and, if the figures are correct, the number of blogs is still growing. In fact, the blogosphere has almost doubled in a year.

According to the report, Technorati has indexed 133m blogs since the company started in 2002. The same figure in last year's report was just 70m, which suggests some impressive growth. Can it be so?

Technorati has released its 'State of the Live Web' report, which is the new name for its 'State of the Blogosphere' report.

The figures indicate that the blogosphere is still growing, with Technorati now tracking over 70m blogs worldwide, up from around 57m at the time of the last report in November 2006.

Dave Sifry has just published a post talking up recent traffic figures for blog search engine Technorati - prompting speculation that he is trying to attract a buyer for the site.

According to Sifry's post, Technorati has experienced astonishing growth in visitor numbers, with 9m users in March this year, compared with 3.5m in January. In addition, page views rose by 53% in March, and 141% since January.

Existing websites don't normally double or triple traffic in the space of 8 weeks, so that's an unbelievably fine effort.

A post by Pranam Kolari on ebiquity's blog claims that the English-speaking blogosphere has reached its peak.

This echoes predictions made by Gartner in December that the blogosphere will top out this year at 100m blogs, and start to decline thereafter.

Technorati’s latest State of the Blogosphere report shows continuing growth in the number of active blogs, with over 57 million blogs currently being tracked.

However, growth in blog numbers has slowed slightly since the last quarter, something Technorati put down to more effective measures at limiting the number of spam blogs (aka 'splogs') listed. This is a good thing.

Let's dip into the figures...

An article in the FT this week attempted to cast some light on the most influential blogs in the UK and Europe, though the methodology used to calculate the blog rankings leaves a little to be desired.

The piece was based on a study conducted by blog search engine Technorati and Edelman, the PR firm, but instead of using traditional metrics such as reach and audience share, it used the number of inbound links to determine a blog’s ‘influence’.

So what’s wrong with that?