From this News.com article on Motorola’s recent success with the Razor:

More than a million of the slim handsets have been sold.

But that’s not really the point. This is:

Overall, 674 million cell phones were sold worldwide in 2004, a 30 percent increase from the year before. Gartner credited the increase in part to emerging cell phone markets in Latin America. Growth is expected to remain robust in 2005, with Gartner predicting 730 million cell phone sales.

730 MILLON phones. That’s just a damn big lot of anything. All I have to say about that is this (well actually, it’s not me, it’s the Economist):

In the early 1980s AT&T asked McKinsey to estimate how many cellular phones would be in use in the world at the turn of the century. The consultancy noted all the problems with the new devices—the handsets were absurdly heavy, the batteries kept running out, the coverage was patchy and the cost per minute was exorbitant—and concluded that the total market would be about 900,000. At the time this persuaded AT&T to pull out of the market, although it changed its mind later.

David Sifry founder and CEO of Technorati has put together his take on the growth of the blogosphere in a two day post. The first post discusses the growth in the number of blogs, while the second post discusses the growth in posts.

In a nutshell, the number of blogs is doubling approximately every five months, and the number of posts is also growing, but not as consistently as the number of blogs. The posting frequency also shows huge swings apparently tied to major news events (e.g., the US presidential election, the Indian Ocean tsunami, etc.).

Update: 2005_03_16
From Greg Linden’s post regarding blogging spam (blam?) in the comments of David’s first post:

The spam has become increasingly sophisticated over the last several months. For example, we often see blogs that appear to be real with several articles posted. Careful inspection shows the articles are copied from elsewhere with shill links inserted to some website that’s trying to increase its PageRank.

And jkottke notes that:

I think it’s important to keep in mind that the number of weblogs added to the Technorati database and the number of weblogs being created are not the same, nor are the trends necessarily the same. In particular, I’m very skeptical about the huge jump in blogs created per day that happened in the last two months of 2004. It seems likely to me that could be more an artifact of how Technorati is finding blogs (found a previously undiscovered vein of blogs or something) or some other explanation.

benjamin’s suggests trying a search on Technorati for a Sony DSC-V3 to see how much blam there really is (it’s A LOT).

Could it be after years of not getting the web (i.e., Active Channels, Smart Tags, ActiveX’s massive security holes, etc.) that Microsoft is starting to “get” the web. As evidence…

Microsoft Bloggers

Mr Scoble seems to be worth his salary. He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience. Bosses and PR people at other companies are taking note.

IE7 Rumors

Sources say that IE 7.0 – which is code-named “Rincon,” they hear – will be a tabbed browser.

IE 7.0 will feature international domain name (IDN) support; transparent Portable Network Graphics (PNG) support, which will allow for the display of overlayed images in the browser; and new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE 7.0, partner sources said. The new browser also will likely include a built-in news aggregator (emphisis mine).

MSN Spaces

We’ve been live now for less than six weeks, but the rate at which people have signed up and started their own Space has been phenomenal. We just found out that we hit the 1.5 million Spaces mark earlier today. You can imagine how excited we are that we’ve had that many people sign up in that short of a time, with people still signing on at an explosive rate.

Keyword Searching (WSJ Article)

For now, the new functions Microsoft is testing appear to be more advanced than those offered by its lead competitors. Today most services charge fees based on the number of “clicks” on a specific advertisement but provide little information about people who searched on a specific term.

An advertiser linked to “NCAA basketball,” for instance, on MSN adCenter could view graphs showing that mostly males age 16 to 60 searched for the term. Such information can be sued by Microsoft to tailor its fees based on the audience and move online advertisers from “buying keywords to buying an audience,” Microsoft Vice President Yusuf Mehdi said.

Pretty impressive especially considering that companies such as Yahoo! whose bread and butter is online services don’t even have a blogging offering yet… at least not until March 29th.

Justice.

P.S. Part one here.