A way to sort through all the blogs

How many blogs exist? A lot, that much we know for sure. But which ones should you bother reading?

One way to index the most appealing blogs is the Technorati Top 100 list.

Technorati.com is one of the Web’s best sites for tracking and finding what’s being posted on blogs. It has a few slick tools for diving into the data.

The most popular blogs, at any given point, can be found through the Technorati Pop blogs tracker, at http://technorati.com/ pop/blogs. Among the top 10 last week, five were technology-focused blogs: Engadget, Boing Boing, Gizmodo, Techcrunch (Nos. 1 through 4), and Ars Technica, at No. 7.

The rankings are supposed to reflect the sites with the most unique new visits, going back six months.

What has also been noted is a slowing down in the growth of blogs across the planet. As of April 2007, the number of blogs tracked through Technorati topped 72 million. The number is up from 35 million blogs it tracked a year ago and eight million in 2005.

A Technorati “state of the live Web” report also noted a slowing down in daily posting volume. Technorati was tracking about 1.5 million blog posts per day in March of this year, compared with 1.3 million posts per day from just a year ago — meaning the rise in posts is starting to level off.

The leveling off for total blogs and number of posts could reflect a saturation level being reached by the people who are likely to create blogs or read them.