Things have been incredibly busy over at the day job, so it is nice every once in a while to take a step back and look at the big picture. To prepare for my presentation at last week's Web 2.0, my team ran a number of analyses on the collected data that we've been tracking since November 2002, when the Technorati service started, and we've noted a number of interesting trends over the past 2 years, so I thought I'd take some time out this week and blog about each one of them, accompanied by some charts and graphs showing the underlying data.

First off, let's look at the size of the blogosphere (click on the picture for a larger version):

First off, we're now tracking over 4 Million weblogs. Regular readers will remember that we tracked the 3 Millionth weblog on July 7th, just 3 months ago. In addition, the blogosphere has been doubling at a regular pace, and it is now more than 8 times as large as it was in June of 2003. In addition, the slowest rate at which the blogosphere has doubled in size is once every 5 months.

This leads to the second graph, which shows the acceleration of the growth of the blogosphere:

This shows the number of new weblogs being created every day. Right now, there are about 12,000 new weblogs being created each day, which means that on average, a new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds. It is important to understand, though, that not all weblogs are regularly posted to - in fact, about 45% of all older weblogs have not had a post in 3 months. This may be due to abandonment, hosting service switches, tire kicking, or other factors, Mary Hodder has a good discussion on these issues.

Tomorrow: Volume of posts, and what it can tell us about ourselves...