State of the Bloggsphere: April 2006

David Sifry has part one of the report up today.

From the post:

"In summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

For historical perspective, you can see earlier State of the Blogosphere reports from February 2006, July 2005, from March 2005, and from October 2004."

Terry Heaton's take on the report:

"Blogging and other forms of new media are a fact of life, and this growth is nothing to sneeze at, even though the user numbers are still relatively small. Local broadcasters need to get involved in blogging and in their blogging communities, but there's more.

It's not enough for local broadcasters to just get into new media alternatives to their business model; they must also use their mass marketing clout -- while they still have it -- to encourage people to use new approaches in media. Yes, I realize that sounds heretical, but you don't have to actually ask people to abandon your broadcast platform to invite them to use your RSS feeds or your smart aggregators, or to teach them what those things are.

Look, the point is that the migration from old to new is happening whether mass media entities assist in moving it forward or not. Would you rather have your viewers learn of Media 2.0 opportunities from you or Yahoo! and Google? Moreover, wouldn't you want them using YOUR applications instead of theirs."