Technorati is now tracking over 50 million blogs. And the number of blogs is growing exponentially.

This means a few things.

• With blogging growing that fast, it is inevitable that blogs will become a major part of enterprise communications in the near future. CTOs, CIOs and CKOs that fight that trend will find their people turning to open, external providers. That might not be a bad thing, but the more cautious route would probably be to provide a company sanctioned secure alternative.
• 50 Million Blogs means 50 Million Addresses. People have debated the meaning of this 50 million blogs number. Kevin Burton points out that the number of blog posts is not growing at the same rate. Bloggers are only posting 1.6 million posts a day. Kevin points to an article by Matthew Hurst in which he says
  

  the count of the size of the blogosphere makes no sense. When one looks at population statistics, one doesn’t count all the dead people. Why do the same for blogs?

  The answer is simple. A “dead blog”, which is a blog that hasn’t been updated in a while, still has a huge amount of value, much like the writings of dead people. We don’t take Einstein, or Newton or Plato off the shelf just because they have kicked the bucket.

  Blogs certainly have more value when they are updated regularly. However, that doesn’t mean that blogs do not continue to add value today if they have not been updated in a while.

  The most amazing thing about blogs is not that they are updated regularly, but instead, that they give anyone with access to the Internet the ability to communicate with everyone else on the Internet. You just can not do that with email. Think about it. You can not send out one email to a Billion plus people. Apart from anything else, spamming technology would stop you. But you can write a web page that could be seen by that many people. The Yahoo! page has been seen by that many people.

  Blogs are special because they deliver on the promise of a read/write web. Blogs come close delivering on the promise of the web, the promise of almost zero publishing costs.

  And blogs can be searched, indexed, run into feeds and cross referenced.

  What does this mean for a “dead” blog like my second site. In addition to this blog, I have a second one that I have not updated in a while. It is called 72 seconds, and mainly includes photos. I haven’t updated it in a while because my camera broke. Matthew Hurst would call it a “dead blog”. And it may be.

  However, I still have the 12th highest ranking picture of chickens in the world.

  

  In other words, my “dead” blog still adds value. Literally thousands of people visit it every month. Most of them come to the site through Google image search. Many of them are looking for pictures of chickens.

  The point here is that blogs can add tremendous value even when they are not updated on a regular basis. In an enterprise setting a simple “People Page“, which might only be updated once a year, can still provide colleagues with a face, a name, a list of projects, and a list of clients.

  

  Maybe the People Page isn’t really a “blog”. Who cares. You use blogging software to create it. And even when it hasn’t been updated in a while, it still adds value.

  And that is why 50 Million Blogs means 50 Million Live Addresses, which is a very cool and powerful milestone. Congratulations Technorati!