Technorati has published its quarterly ‘State of the Blogosphere‘ report on its blog. Given the fact that Technorati gets pinged by many blogs as soon as they are published, and it quickly crawls the others, it is in a unique position to see what is happening in the world of blogs.

It starts with the graph showing just how many blogs there are, and how quickly the number is growing:

The actual number of blogs is not particularly interesting to me in itself: most of them will be posted to once a month if they are lucky, and only about 1% of those posted to more frequently will have any interesting content to anyone other than the blogger’s circle of friends. That’s fine, its just not the type of blogging that is causing a social media revolution. It is just an extension of email.

The ‘important’ type of blogging as far as I am concerned are those blogs which are of interest to greater numbers of people each. What the above statistic shows is a great vote of support in those blogs, because people are reading those blogs and wanting to become bloggers themselves. It is a vote in support of the principle of blogging. A common criticism of blogging is that people don’t trust what they read on blogs. When 57 million people agree with a concept enough to start doing it themselves, the concept has some legs. That’s not even considering the millions more who simply subscribe to blogs. I think we can say blogging is here to stay!

There are all sorts of other juicy statistics in the post, from the proportion of top media sites which are blogs down to what time most posts are published. Well worth a read!