I was fascinated to read Robin Good’s report on the annual Technorati Blog Statistics and Trends report that has just been released by Technorati CEO, Dave Silfy.

Not surprisingly the report shows that the uptake of blogs continues to escalate at an explosive pace, but there are signs also that the “blogosphere” is maturing, with some definite patterns of use establishing in what the data reveals. Some indications of this growth include:

• The blogosphere is now 70 million weblogs wide
• About 120,000 new weblogs are created each day, or…
• 1.5 million posts per day
• 1.4 new blogs are created every second
• 17 posts are made every second

Robin’s post is the place to head for a fuller summary of what the report says, but a couple of things did stand out for me.

The first relates to the internationalisation of blogs – and the language they are written in. According to the Technorati stats for this year, the Japanese are now the world’s greatest blogging nation (based on langauge of blogs). Of the top four languages for blogging, Japanese retakes the top spot from the last report, with 37% (up from 33%) of the posts followed closely by English at 36% (down from 39%). Next after these two front-running languages is Chinese which comes in third at 8% (down from 10% in 2006, and fourth is Italian at 3% (up from 2% last year).

The other thing that caught my eye is the data indicating a rapid rise in the use of Tagging. The report noted that 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags. As Silfy states; “we???re seeing explosive growth in the tags index. People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages.. Is this the sign we’ve been looking for to confirm the establishment of folksonomies as a legitimate contender for how we organise and mange information>

Read the full State of the Live Web report by David Silfy in its original version with additional graphs and stats here:
The State of the Live Web, April 2007

There are also links to the previous year’s Technorati reports at the bottom of Robin Good’s post – these provide very useful reading to make comparisons and discover where the trends are.