Kevin Burton’s NEW FeedBlog

Nice! Another set of eye candy is out with the State of the Blogosphere, August 2005 (Part 1):

There’s a growing number of WordPress-based hosted services that are arising, including Laughing Squid, Dreamhost, and Blue Host, marking an interesting trend - that of ISPs and hosting providers using the GPL’ed software as a differentiating feature of their services…

I wish they would publish the numbers for WordPress blogs. I’m curious about the TypePad effect of centralized hosting providers.

A lot of people install their own WordPress installation (Om Malik is an example) but if people are running centralized installations with dozens/hundreds of blogs then we’re going to see the Typepad/LiveJournal effect again.

This isn’t too bad of a thing. It’s just unfortunate that if one hosting provider goes offline it can hit 10k blogs or so.

You can see the charts from March 2005 and November 2004 to get an idea of how this is increasing, although all the data is included on the chart above. Technorati is now tracking about 80,000 new weblogs being created every day, which means a new weblog is created about every second. About 55% of all blogs are considered active - that is, 55% of all weblogs have had a posting in the last 3 months. In addition, 13% of all weblogs (currently 1.8 Million blogs) update at least weekly.

I can’t really wrap my head around these numbers. For some reason they’re a bit fishy. There just can’t be that much growth and if so it can’t be sustainable.

It might be that the Blogosphere is just going to take over the Webosphere. If blogs account for 80% of web content in the future then we should see some sustained growth moving forward.

Not sure I buy it though. Either there are a lot of spam blogs in their index or these are tester blogs. Either way it would be nice to see which ones are updated regularly with original content over the long term.