Report: A Blog Born Every Second

By: Christine Lagorio

The blogosphere may be a baby, but it is booming, Web trackers say.

Although the concept of "blogging" didn't exist a decade ago, today the number of blogs doubles every five months. And a new blog is created almost every second — that's more than 80,000 every day, according to the blog tracking group Technorati.

"The tools to create blogs have become markedly easier and more accessible," Technorati Founder and CEO David L. Sifry told CBSNews.com. "If the numbers continue going the way that they are, you should expect to see close to 30 million blogs by March of next year and should be seeing 2 million posts a day."

Technorati uses search-engine sorting and update pings to keep tabs on the blogosphere — the name for the expanding universe of Weblogs. Blogs were once mostly personal journals and homepages, made popular by those wanting to share their thoughts immediately and free of cost. Today, many media outlets and businesses also have taken up blogging as a means for quickly spreading news and ideas.

The August report, called State of the Blogosphere, points to the fast growth of cost-free blogging services, such as Blogger, LiveJournal and use of software such as WordPress and Movable Type as causes for the exponential growth of the blog world.

Sifry said that compared to other groups' statistics, Technorati's might appear low. That's because it uses a conservative definition of "blog," which excludes hosted information pages such as Friendster or Myspace.com.

Technorati's definition: A site that's created and updated using one of the 20 most popular blogging management systems. It must be at least partially public, but need not be regularly updated.