Sifry Reports on State of Live Web

Technorati Founder David Sifry has published his quarterly report on the State of the Blogosphere, with a new name: State of the Live Web. As the numbers indicate, blogging, the original social media blogging tool is maturing, while other tools photo sharing, podcasting, music, video and event sharing are now experiencing exponential growth.

Steve Rubel says the data indicates that blogging is peaking.  I disagree. The rate of growth is slowing, as has happened for everything that sustains rapid growth for several years-televisions, cars, personal computers, etc. To me the data indicates that blogging is normalizing and will sustain a long, steady and less dramatic growth for years to come as more and more social media tools come in to play.

Still the blog numbers remain astounding. There are now over 70 million blogs, having doubled in the last 10 months. There 120 new posts started daily.  People post 17 times per second in an array of the world's languages with English and Japanese continuing to run neck-and-neck in the lead.

The most notable change, according to Sifry, is the proliferation of tags, a Technorati innovation. People are tagging everything, everywhere and thus finding and sharing digital content in all forms, as social media moves from just words into visual and audio as well.