Growth of the blogosphere

David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati, has been posting some great surveys of blogging activity.  Part 1 "Growth of Blogs" looks at the growth in the number of blogs from March 2003 to February 2005 – no surprise: huge growth in number of blogs. Technorati tracks 7.8 million weblogs with 937 million links with the number of blogs doubling in size every 5 months (this doubling pattern has now persisted every five months over the past 20 months).  Part 2 "Posting Volume" measures blogging activity in terms of the rate of posting to blogs, showing that we have gone from a rough average of 100,000 posts/day in January 2004 to about 500,000 posts/day in February 2005, although with quite a bit of volatility, driven at least in part by current events. Part 3 "The A List and the Long Tail" measures the influence or authority of a site as indicated by the number of people who are linking to it – the key finding here is that the mass media dominate the fat part of the distribution, with some notable exceptions (15 of the top 37 sites are blogs) and some fluidity in rankings between October 2004 and March 2005.  Part 4, due any day now, will focus on tags and tagging activity.

What’s my take on this? Well, growth continues to be explosive, power laws in terms of blog linking are alive and well and yet there is still a lot of potential for shifting position in terms of rankings.

More fundamentally, we are being inundated with options in terms of information sources and we are only at the earliest stages of figuring out how to harness this wealth of information.  When media explodes, the scarce resource becomes attention and anything that can help individuals maximize their return on attention will be very valuable indeed.