Tracking the growth of blogs

I've been interested in the growth of blogs and keep track of Technorati's updates. Every several months they come out with a new "state of the blogosphere" with very interesting information about blogs. Here's the most recent report.

I'll show some of the highlights from the report below, but I'm especially interested in this list of blog growth according to Technorati's previous reports:

Worldwide Blog Growth:

• January 2004 – less than 2 million blogs
• July 2004 – 3.5 million
• January 2005 – 6 million
• July 2005 – 12 million
• January 2006 – 24 million
• July 2006 – 50 million
• October 2006 – 57 million
• March 2007 – 70 million

The sheer growth in 2006 alone is unbelievable. There are some equally unbelievable numbers and data in this most recent report. Here are the highlights:

• 70 million weblogs now
  
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or...
• 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
• Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or...
• 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%
• Italian fourth at 3%
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February

So just think, in the time it took you to read this post 63 new blogs were created and 765 new blog posts were written but you probably can't read over a third of them because they were in Japanese. Seems to me, translators like Babel Fish are going to be increasingly important.