How fast is this blog phenomenon thing growing? Just ask Dave Sifry as he wrestles with the 'simple' task of tracking only the pinging subset of what's out there ...

One year ago, when I started Technorati on a single server in my basement, we were adding between 2,000-3,000 new weblogs each day ... In March of this year ... we were keeping up with about 4,000-5,000 new weblogs each day. Right now, we're adding 8,000-9,000 new weblogs every day, not counting the 1.2 Million weblogs we already are tracking. That means that on average, a brand new weblog is created every 11 seconds. We're also seeing about 100,000 weblogs update every day as well, which means that on average, a weblog is updated every 0.86 seconds.

That's a lot of blog content rolling out, and there's few signs of any of easing. Heck, even journalists spontaneously reach for a blog when push comes to shove, and while I ponder whole new vertical subnet Technoratis which feed up to clustered hubs of a new data-mining industry, I'm still in total awe of what he's done and all those new frontiers where he continues to take his site.