On July 31, 2006, Technorati tracked its 50 millionth blog. David Sifry writes:

Technorati has been tracking the blogosphere, or world of weblogs, since November 2002, and I’m constantly amazed at the growth over the years. The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months or so. It is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.

Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months. That means things have slowed somewhat - the rate of doubling has increased by about half a month to once every seven months.

What I found so interesting in these numbers is that the graph has stayed so flat in the range of 150-200 day doublings for so long. From January 2004 until July 2006, almost two and a half years later, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.

Whenever I write about these statistics, I’m always asked by people, “Can it continue to grow this quickly?” Frankly, I can’t possibly imagine it continuing to grow at this pace - after all, there are only so many human beings in the world! It has to slow down.