David Sifry founder and CEO of “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/ has put together his take on the growth of the blogosphere in a two day post. The first “post”:http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000298.html discusses the growth in the number of blogs, while the second “post”:http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000299.html 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”:http://www.sifry.com/alerts/images/Slide0005-1-tm.jpg 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:

bq. 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:

bq. 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″:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=Sony+DSC-V3 to see how much _blam_ there really is (it’s A LOT).