Well, it’s been six months since his last State of the Blogosphere address, but Technorati’s Dave Sifry has been busy tracking and mapping the latest trends, comprehensive results for which are to be found in his latest five-part blog post series.

Part 1 on Blog Growth reveals the number of weblogs out there has been doubling in size every five months. The folks at Technorati have found a burgeoning 14.2 million weblogs and over 1.3 billion links. 80,000 blogs are created daily and a new weblog created every second, and 55% of new bloggers are still posting three months later. Those receiving top marks for attendance are the 13% of blogs that are updated daily (yes, I am aiming to be one of them, but haven’t gotten there yet… sigh!). Dave’s report on Blog Growth here.

Whether a single post is a long essay or a short entry, each qualifies as a post. The State of the Blogosphere Part 2 reports on Posting Volumes, the aggregate number of posts per day. As at July 2005, 900,000 posts were being created daily – that’s 37,500 per hour or 10.4 per second, with obvious spikes during world events such as Live 8 or the London Bombings.

Over 25 million blog posts now use tags for categories or topics. 12,000 are being discovered each day, and photos and links are now being tagged too.

Part 4 Spam and Fake Blogs dwells on the darker side of the blogosphere – created to influence results on a search engine by filling the results with spam or fake postings, usually to some advantage. here

In Part 5, Dave Sifry reports on the The List and the Long Tail – the impact of weblogs on mainstream media, the A-list, and the measure of influence or authority of a site or blog by the number of people linking to it.

All interesting stuff and a great place to check out if you love statistics, graphs, and a one-stop update on The State of the Blogosphere.