I read a recent article in Discover magazine that said there were nearly 60 million blogs currently online, and about 175,000 new ones each day. They already did the math (I didn’t check it, I assume it’s correct ) that says that’s a new blog starting every half a second.

The main reason this is probably correct is the number of spam blogs or “splogs” which they didn’t touch on in the article at all. There are people with automated tools that go out and register for new blogs, then scrape (meaning steal) content from other sites and repost it, along with the nearly ubiquitous adsense advertisements from google. There is very little effort involved in setting these up, especially if you use a free host for your blog. (There are no adsense advertisements anywhere on the phpBB Doctor site or blog, nor do I intend to have them. I use them on other sites, but have no interest / no need for them here. I do, of course, reserve the right to change my mind once the site is serving up 100,000 page impressions a day. Ha. )

The article did provide a very interesting map of blog links, which I will have to wait a few months before I can share with you. Discover Magazine does release their content but there is a delay during which subscribers get to see the content first, then it’s opened to the rest of the world. What they did on this picture was pick different blogosphere “centers” and show inbound / outbound / two-way links from these points. As you might expect there are certain blogs / systems that attract a lot more interest than others, and therefore have a lot more inbound links.

But back to the original numbers. 175,000 new blogs. Every. Day. Wow.

So, you blogging yet? Better get going before it’s too late.