Dave Sifry offers Technorati’s latest state of the blogosphere, one of the best way to size up the growth, the evolution and measure the importance of the blogosphere and other social media. Highlights:

Size of the blogosphere:

Technorati tracks over 70 million blogs (74.9M today), about 120,000 new ones are created worldwide every day.

Mainstream media vs. blogs:

“The number of blogs in the top 100 most popular sites has risen substantially. During Q3 2006 there were only 12 blogs in the Top 100 most popular sites. In Q4, however, there were 22 blogs on the list”

Languages:

“Japanese retakes the top spot from our last report, with 37% (up from 33%) of the posts followed closely by English at 36% (down from 39%). Additionally there was movement in the middle of the top 10 languages, highlighted by Italian overtaking Spanish for the number four spot.”

Tags:

“The bottom line: we’re seeing explosive growth in the tags index. People are clicking on tags, people are using tags, Google features tagged media in its results pages. Tags adoption has become a phenomenon across the Live Web (definition), and we are seeing a correlative explosive growth at Technorati. Technorati is now tracking over 230 million posts using tags or categories, and the number of people who are using tags is growing.” This confirms the Pew Report on tagging we covered in January.

Summary:

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or 1.4 new blogs every second
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day. Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December
• 1.5 million posts per day, or 17 posts per second
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 – up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%, English second at 33%, Chinese third at 8%, Italian fourth at 3%, Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories, 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags, 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February

What it means: the blogosphere is now a brilliant and strong standalone ecosystem. I believe it has reached a scale which makes it a viable environment for new business opportunities. I also like the comment about tags as I strongly believe the future of Web information will leverage structured data.