Number of blogs is doubling every five months

LONDON - A blog is born every second, according to research from web tracking company Technorati, bringing the number of weblogs it is tracking up from 7.8m in March to 14.2m at the end of July.

The US company's latest 'State of the Blogosphere' report claims that the number of blogs is doubling every five months, with around 80,000 new weblogs being created every day.

The research revealed that 13% of all blogs tracked by Technorati are updated weekly or more regularly, and 55% of all new bloggers are still posting blogs three months after they started.

Free blogging services are also growing at a fast rate, such as those provided by MSN, Blogger, LiveJournal and AOL, and the use of software to create blogs such as WordPress and Movable Type has increased.

Technorati acts like a search engine that tracks what is occurring in the blogosphere, the name given to the realm where blogs exist.

Last month, research from online monitoring firm Hitwise signified the growing importance of bloggers by revealing that one in every 200 web visits is to a blog website.

The growing number of blogs has also seen the power of blogs grow as well. Bloggers are increasingly breaking stories before the mainstream media or being used to exert pressure on the mainstream media.

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