They Have the Internet on Computers Now!

Here's Technorati's State of the Blogosphere, October 2005. Excerpt:

Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs, and the total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months. This trend has been consistent for at least the last 36 months. In other words, the blogosphere has doubled at least 5 times in the last 3 years. Another way of looking at it is that the blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago.

On the other hand, FY1976 sales figures for pet rocks were 30 times greater than they had been three years previously. (Kidding.)

Also, Yahoo started adding blogs to its news searches last week; Here's Technology Review on various other Yahoo initiatives. Excerpts:

At Google, research is woven into the fabric of the company: software engineers are required to spend 20 percent of their time on far-out ideas, a policy that's given rise to a host of spin-off Google sites.

Microsoft, for its part, has funded extensive research in areas such as data mining and information retrieval, including a system that assembles information from the Web and a user's hard drive before he or she has even realized they need it.

But for Yahoo, having a research operation that helps to invent emerging information tools has never been a major priority. Indeed, until two years ago, the company didn't even have its own search engine -- it rented Google's.

But now that's changing -- and fast.

Competition is sweet -- The Invisible Handwidth. But, it looks like Yahoo has some tweaking to do, unless they were just trying to blogw sweet nothings into our ears... This Yahoo news + blogs search for the word 'Porkbusters' only got seven hits, all of which were from such eminent non-blogs as USN&WR and Investor's Business Daily, dated as far back as late September. Technorati has about 20 hits for the same search for just blogs for the last four days.