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This week, Technorati – the recognized authority in indexing and searching weblogs – releases its newest State of the Blogosphere Report 2008. This year’s report is divided into 5 parts (or 5 days). So, till Friday, we won’t have a full data, but the first days’ data are enough for interesting findings.

The most obvious is that the blogosphere growth becomes more and more impressive – 133 million blogs indexed since 2002 vs. 70 million blogs in April 2007. 900K blogs are created every day vs. 120K in 2007. So, if last year people created more than 1 blog every second, now there are 10 blogs created every second! At the same time, the daily number of posts is now only about a million vs. 1.4 million posts a day in 2007. But it’s still significant, isn’t it?

Another interesting trend is growing popularity of blogs vs. the mainstream media. In 2007 we saw only 22 blogs in the Top 100 list of the most popular websites and the highest position of a blog was 19^th. This year we can see that 4 of 10 Top entertainment sites are blogs, and two of them take the first and the second positions. Maybe, one of the reasons of such a significant growth is the fact that blogs are changing their format and the difference between top blogs and classic mainstream media became less and less clear. This fact is also emphasized in the report: “Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere”.

This is a very interesting trend. Yes, we all notice that the largest blogs are created by a team of writers, although initially blogs were intended to be maintained by individuals. Among the most popular blogs, we can see a few individual blogs – for instance, Seth Godin’s and Heater Armstrong’s ones. Mainstream media also borrow some features of blogs, i.e. comments, and they have their own blogs too. And, the main reason of future merging is that people usually don’t care is the website they like a blog or a mainstream media if it give them the information and entertainment they want. And as the blogs offer more and more entertaining and functional features, people more and more like them.

Technorati also pays great attention to the bloggers – who they are, where they are from, why and about what they are blogging, etc. Here are some of the highlights:

1. Two-thirds of all bloggers are male;
2. 50% are aged 18-34;
3. Bloggers are more affluent and educated than the general population (70% have college degrees);
4. 44% of bloggers are parents.

Among the reasons why people blog, the most popular are to share their opinions and experience with others, to meet new friends and like minded people, business or self promotion.

So, if you’re interested in blogosphere life, visit Technorati site to read the report fully and let’s waiting for the last half of this interesting and informative report. We’ll publish a short review of the next three parts of Technorati’s report, so don’t miss it!