Growth of Blogs, Splogs & Tags

David Sifry has a very comprehensive post about the state of the blogosphere from nearly every aspect, i.e., overall growth, number of posts by second, minute, hour, spam, language and other trends.

The two slides I found particularly interesting were the popularity of online sites based on readership and where some of the more prominent and some of the less prominent blogs fell on the chart. The other one of course was language, which put Japanese bloggers ahead of English-speaking bloggers -- ahead by 1%. Italian blogs have now surpassed Spanish blogs. See below. Click on any of them to enlarge.

Source: Technorati

Numbers have continued to rise, with them now tracking over 70 million blogs, with 120,000 new blogs being created worldwide each day. The real question we always ask -- is how many remain active and have a substantial audience to matter? How many are really online journals for the eyes of a select view versus a voice that will rise to the top and matter?

Not surprising, spam and splogs (spam blogs) are up. Lastly, they are now reporting on the growth of tags, which have risen in use, particularly due to popular sites which promote tagging like YouTube and flickr. See their chart on tag use growth below.

# 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
# 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February