Dave Sifry (Mr. Technorati) has a State of the Blogosphere report online.

Interesting, with few surprises but some interesting insights (spam pings and other such deviations of blogs, which is expected but interesting).

The figure that stood out to me, however, was the staying power of blogs. Sure, blog creation/posts and so on are way up over a year ago, but the – as Sifry neatly phrases it – “there’s a reasonable amount of tire-kicking” with blogs going on.

While the number of blog has increased dramatically, the percentage of folks who stick with it is staying roughly the same:

• February 2006 Technorati tracks over 27.2 Million blogs; 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created (50%)
• October 2005 Technorati tracks 19 million blogs, about 10.4 million bloggers were still posting 3 months after the creation of their blogs (54%).

So – overall – while more blogs are created, the same percentage die quickly. While this means – overall – more blogs, it also means that the perceived value vs. effort has not increased, even as the blogosphere has expanded.

Interesting.