Jamie Is Playing Favorites

So, Mister Irrelevant hisself, Jamie Mottram, has grabbed a big bit of blog fame -- if you go to the main page of blog search engine Technorati, and you hit refresh enough times, you will see a promo for Jamie Mottram's Favorite Blogs:

It's all part of an ongoing Technorati promotion around their Favorites functionality -- it's kind of like a beefed-up blogroll (sounds like a fast food); you create a list of your favorite blogs, and they will display the most recent entries from those blogs.

It's one easy way to keep tabs of what's going on in your favorite blogs, though it's primary purpose is to share your favorite blogs in a way that's a little more meaningful than a straight links list. I haven't created one yet, though I probably will, eventually.

The reason why Jamie is being featured is because Technorati has been highlighting the Favorites of a bunch of blog movers and shakers, so Jamie is swimming with some of the big fish in the big ole sphere o' blogs such as Wil Wheaton and Arianna Huffington:

(The photo being used in Jamie's Favorites promo was snapped by some of the Technorati folks during a visit to campus a few months ago.)

You'll note that I've been talking about Technorati a bunch lately (like all the tagging and blog search stuff). This isn't a payola thing -- they're pretty authoritative in the blog space, as seen by their April State of the Blogosphere report, which was just posted to their blog today. I will just paste their summary bullet points:

    * Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
    * The blogosphere is doubling in size every 6 months
    * It is now over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
    * On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
    * 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created
    * Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour

They have some interesting graphs, too, so check it out and see how many new neighbors you have in the blogosphere.

The "how many blogs in the blogosphere?" question used to be an issue of some contention by those who care about such things, since invariably, someone would say, "Well, you didn't count the X million blogs over here" and there would be big, barely comprehensible arguments about methodologies and spam blogs and inactive blogs, etc.

Thanks -- Joe