Okay, it's a cheap pun. But I'm not afraid to own it.

David Sifry, Mr. Technoratus, has posted an analysis of the state of the Blogosphere. And there's more to come, apparently.

It looks like people who start blogs are more likely to keep them going than they were a few years ago, possibly a function of the lower barrier to entry. With automatic tools to do most of our formatting, we really don't need to know HTML THANK THE GOOD LORD! Because until that little snag was overcome we had to be content with very limited templates, or we had to go over to the dark side. And if you knew HTML, what in god's name were you doing with a dinky little blog anyway? You could have a website, man. It's like having a bicycle when you could have a jet-enabled Transformer. Blogs are for the civilians.

There are no shortage of techie bloggers, though. Does this mean I'm wrong? Oh, perish the thought, bitches. It means that even techies get tired of having their whole posts go POOF cuz they forgot one single "/" or something. They are able to recognize something damn useful just as quick as anybody else, and they jumped on it. As previously posted on this blog (I'll find the link when I'm less lazy) technical blogging, while still dominant, is in decline. Again, this is a barrier to entry thing; before, only techies and those willing to put up with a great deal of crap and/or learn a completely new and artificial language could blog with any degree of proficiency. Now, anybody who can type (and many people who can merely type, rather than spell or think) can blog. So the techies are being diluted. As well, at a certain point you don't neccessarily want to pontificate, you want to communicate; the livejournalers go to chat, the techies go to IM. And, increasingly, to meatspace.

Imagine that: Facetime! It's the new hotness.

In summary:

• Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
• It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
• On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
• 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour