'Blogosphere' expands 100-fold in three years

Fifty million blogs - online multi-media journals - were tracked on the Internet last month, a 100-fold increase over three years, according to a new study published online.

Fifty million blogs - online multi-media journals - were tracked on the Internet last month, a 100-fold increase over three years, according to a new study published online.

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Technorati, a website devoted to tracking the growth of the worldwide "blogosphere", claims their number has doubled every five to seven months since January 2004, and looks set to reach 100 million by next February.

Last month, the company logged 175,000 new journals every day - an average of two per second - with 1.6 million blog messages posted daily, double the volume of a year ago.

English-language sites make up 39 percent of the total, followed by Japanese at 31 percent and Chinese with 12 percent.

Some new blogs however -- around eight percent, Technorati says -- are in fact spam sites, known colourfully as "splogs", which have slipped through the search engine's net undetected.