Technorati, which began tracking blogs in late 2002, serves as a registry for the online journals, indexing and ranking them for professional and personal bloggers alike.
"I'm constantly amazed at the growth over the years," Sifry said. "The blogosphere has been doubling in size every six months or so. It is more than 100 times bigger than it was just three years ago."
According to the Technorati study, the number of total bloggers worldwide exceeds 50 million, with more than 175,000 new blogs launched each day, covering nearly every topic imaginable.
"It really cuts across a wide swath of humanity," Sifry said. "There's lowbrow and highbrow, there's porn, knitting, politics, astrology and zoology."
With so many blogs online, few could hope to be profitable ventures, but then again, few aim to do so, according to ZDNet Editor-in-Chief Dan Farber, who oversees 30 technology bloggers.
"Only a small percentage [of blogs] have a large audience or a business model," Farber said.
While profits may not be rolling in from blogs, a recent XBIZ article reported that many adult industry bloggers have used the medium to drive traffic and supplement their site’s content offerings.
According to Sifry, some of the growing popularity of blogs — both adult-themed and general audience-friendly — needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Although Technorati filters out nonsense blogs and other forms of spam, Sifry said that about 8 percent of the more than 175,000 blogs launched each day can be considered spam.
