Technorati's transitions to the Live Web and taggers

I didn't know this but Technorati has gone from being a company that basically searches blogs to being the "recognized authority on user-generated content search" and "pre-eminent authority on what people are saying online." In any case, despite the lofty self references, the company issued its latest today state of the blogosphere, now called the “State of the Live Web” (thanks to Doc Searls). 

Technorati CEO David Sifry explained the expansion from blogs to Live Web:

While we still have substantial reporting on the the State of the Blogosphere, we now expanding the report to provide information about the State of Tags. Admittedly, the information we have on this new area of focus for our report isn’t as deep or as expansive as our State of the Blogosphere, and we expect that over time, this and other new sections will expand, but we believe this is a good first step in trying to provide a more comprehensive snapshot of the Live Web. 

He goes on to say that Technorati has become an aggregation point beyond blogs, for other forms of tagged social media such as video and photos. Using tags and folksonomies as a search fulcrum provides more metadata and structure for surfacing cross-media search results. In fact, keeping score on "user-generated search content" versus "non-user generated search content" (I guess that would be something like mainstream media, which still dominates for inbound link sources) is less relevant today. When you search, you are looking for the most relevant and authoritative content, and tags, as well as microformats and semantic Web technologies, assist in organizing Web or even intranet content.

Below is the summary data--more blogs to search through for useful content, prolific Japanese bloggers and more taggers.

• 70 million weblogs 
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day, or...   
• 1.4 new blogs every second  
• 3000-7000 new splogs (fake, or spam blogs) created every day
  Peak of 11,000 splogs per day last December 
• 1.5 million posts per day, or...   
• 17 posts per second   
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days   
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 - up from 12 in the prior quarter
  
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
  
• English second at 33%
  
• Chinese third at 8%
  
• Italian fourth at 3%
  
• Farsi a newcomer in the top 10 at 1%
  
• English the most even in postings around-the-clock
  
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
  
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags
  
• 2.5 million blogs posted at least one tagged post in February