Technorati Weblogs Watched vs. Time

About

This graph is rebuilt nightly at midnight Eastern Time. I asked the Technorati folks for permission to publish it, though technically I didn't have to: Technorati has already granted permission for non-commerical use through a Create Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial" license. Asking turned out to be worthwhile (not to mention polite). Dave Sifry's reply contained an important disclaimer:

...feel free to release the chart, but please do so with a grain
of salt - there's a lot of reasons why we have big jumps in blogs
covered...and it is not necessarily due to some magic
expansion of the blogosphere. :-)

Dave's talking at least in part about the fact that they get big jumps when he adds new blogging systems to the spider.

You can access the raw data in a highly-advanced next-generation format at the following URL: http://grumet.net/technorati/technorati-data.txt

The origin for the x-axis, January 1 2003, has no special significance. If you know a magical incantation that will cause gnuplot to use month and year labels, can you send me email?

Armchair data analysis

[24 July 2003] My guess is that they were expanding the spidering operation from days 187 to 194. Growth from days 187 to present (204) is probably true growth of about 3,000 to 4,000 weblogs per day.