State of the blogosphere

Technorati has posted its state of the blogosphere report today. It says that it's currently tracking 14.2 million blogs and over 1.3 billion links (I'm assuming that many of these are to the same sites). The number of blogs has doubled in 5 months. It mentions the growth in international hosting services (MSN Spaces, Blogger, LiveJournal, and AOL Journals). I'm surprised that so many of these--with their clunky interfaces--have been able to make it, but I suppose the tremendous growth in the number of blogs has put the Darwinian law of the jungle on hold for the time being. There's also an increase in the use of software like WordPress and Movable Type--software that, in the right hands, can make blogs look a helluva lot more attractive. (Although I take comfort in the fact that many of the high-ranking blogs in my corner of the blogosphere--sites like Chrenkoff and Lenin's Tomb are the visual equivalent of the Saudi desert. Evidently, there are still a few readers of blogs who prefer content over eye-candy). Technorate also mentions a growing number of WordPress-based hosted services (Laughing Squid, Dreamhost, and Blue Host) marking a trend - that of ISPs and hosting providers using the GPL'ed software as a differentiating feature of their services--as well as moblogging sites like Textamerica and Buzznet. Technorate claims that a new weblog is created about every second with about 55% of all blogs are active (with a post in the last 3 months) and 13% of all weblogs updated at least weekly. The activity stats have been consistent over time, so I guess we're looking at some fairly constant feature of the blogosphere.