Technorati, “the authority” on blog search and stats, has released their report State of the Blogosphere, October 2005 Part 1: On Blogosphere Growth. Their summary:

• As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 million weblogs
• The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
• The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
• About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
• About a new weblog is created each second
• 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
• Between 700,000 and 1.3 million posts are made each day
• About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
• An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average

Thanks to Steve for the tip of the report.

Hummm….so what kind of impact does this have for effective web ministry? Some random thoughts:

• A new blog every second means there’s a lot of voices out there
• Blogs typically ask for comments. I think this can be an invitation for ministry conversations
• Blogs are here to stay…for now anyway. Does this indicate a new trend in social interaction?
• We in ministry, at the least, need to grapple with how blogs can be used effectively for ministry.

What are your thoughts?