The Blogosphere Will Continue To Grow

David Sifry posted his latest State of the Blogosphere, August 2006 today. Lots of potentially interesting data on blogs that Technorati tracks. I wasn’t going to comment on this until I read this:

Whenever I write about these statistics, I’m always asked by people, “Can it continue to grow this quickly?” Frankly, I can’t possibly imagine it continuing to grow at this pace – after all, there are only so many human beings in the world! It has to slow down.
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In January of 2004, the blogosphere was doubling at a rate of once ever 120 days, which is about once every 4 months. By July of 2004, the blogosphere was doubling every 180 days, or about once every 6 months. Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months. That means things have slowed somewhat – the rate of doubling has increased by about half a month to once every seven months.

What I found so interesting in these numbers is that the graph has stayed so flat in the range of 150-200 day doublings for so long. From January 2004 until July 2006, almost two and a half years later, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.

Can this possibly continue? Will I be posting about the 100 Millionth blog tracked in February of 2007? I can’t imagine that things will continue at this blistering pace – it has got to slow down. After all, that would mean that there will be more bloggers around in 7 months than there are bloggers around in total today. I shake my head as I am writing this – the only thing still niggling at my brain is that I’d have been perfectly confident making the same statement 7 months ago when we had tracked our 25 Millionth blog, and I’ve just proven myself wrong.
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As of July 2006, about 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.

David seems to tie the number of blogs they are tracking with the number of bloggers in the world. I think this is a mistake. I believe you’ll find more and more automated blogs out there and I don’t just mean the spam blogs. Although the rate of growth might taper off a bit, I suspect that we’ll still see doubling in under a year for some time to come because more and more blogs won’t be populated directly by people.

Just look at the popularity of topical blogs powered by Planet. I think this is the type of blog (although not necessarily powered by Planet) that will continue to drive the growth in the number of blogs.