The Blogosphere contains an estimated 41 million blogs, and the number has been doubling every six months.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project released a new study all about bloggers. Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers is a 33 page report about who are bloggers.
Notable is that 8% of internet users (12 million American adults) keep a blog; 39% of internet users (57 million American adults) read blogs. However, business blogging wasn't addressed in this survey as all the data relates to people who keep personal blogs.
How to sort through all that content to find useful information is an increasingly vexing question. Blog search engines have existed for years as a way to conduct keyword searches among the vast array of content. Here are four sites that enable consumers to search for news, gossip, reviews and other timely information among blogs and feeds:
Blogsearch.ask.com Searches more than 1.5 billion indexed posts and 2.5 million individual feeds subscribed to Bloglines users and ranks them based on its search technology and the feeds' popularity.
www.Technorati.com Searches 41 million blogs that send "pings" to its servers to notify it when to update its index.
www.Feedster.com Searches some 33 million feeds by monitoring ping servers and crawling the sites itself.
www.Blogsearch.google.com Searches millions of feeds that alert it to updates through ping services. Ranks result using Google's Web search technology and factors unique to blogs like timeliness.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, June 1, 2006