• Google's G-1 Phone ignited a tech blogstorm.
• Technorati recently acquired the BlogCritics network. This makes Technorati a search/content/ad-network hybrid sort of like Yahoo has become - but obviously on a smaller scale than Yahoo.
• Study finds more hiring managers are using social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn to evaluate potential hires.
• Twittermoms is a site where Twitter moms can connect with other Twittering moms. (via TechCrunch)
• Bits reports that Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers have started a blog about the iPhone and their $100 million iFund in mobile applications for the iPhone and iPod touch. The blog is at ifundvc.com
• Another Bits post asks how many web services one person can use. A person can update a lot of web services with tools like Ping.fm but they can't really maintain an active presence on too many websites.
• TwitterKeys will let you add some UFT8 icons to your Twitter conversations.
• Editor and Publisher launched two new blogs: Fitz & Jen and The E&P Pub.
• Giga Omni Media acquired The Apple Blog.
• A blogger was arrested for posting 9 unrelease Guns N' Roses songs.
• Boing Boing and Kevin Kelly discuss the idea of the Whole Earth Catalog as a blog from the 1970s.
• Valleywag says that 2/3 of Heavy.com's salesforce has left.
• Gwyneth Paltrow is launch a lifestyle site called Goop. Some details here.
• A blog with a long name thingswithapproximatelyasmanypeopleaswasilla.com attempts to point out that lots of places and things have as many people as Sarah Palin's hometown where she was mayor.
• Boing Boing Gadgets was not impressed with Esquire's E-Ink cover.
• 1.1 million people read the Wikipedia entry for Sarah Palin in the 36 hours following her introduction. Slate says a college sophmore gets credit for pushing Palin as the vp choice.

Blog Top Tags Widget
Display your top tags with the Blog Top Tags widget in a beautiful cloud formation (or the top tags of any blog). Copy the code snippet below, replacing {URL} with your blog URL. Note: when you first install this widget on your blog, it will take us a few minutes to build a custom widget with your blog's top tags, but then after that we'll keep it up to date for you.

Personal Bee's founder will come in as VP of business development at Technorati; we're not sure whether the value of the target was in engineering, where Technorati's been weak. Any significance beyond that? One person familiar with Personal Bee says Technorati -- which has in the past offered brand-tracking to marketers, ego-surfing to bloggers and search to ordinary users -- plans now to build themed news pages in the style of Techmeme.

We show a little fire icon next to Top Searches, in case you want to write a blurb about something that's super hot.

Here's how we talk about; hope you love it!

Where's the Fire? What's Hot and Why.

Ever wonder why something is sooooo popular? Or want the whole story without having to dig through a zillion blog posts looking for the hot video or juicy pictures? WTF tells what's hot - and why - and where the good stuff is. Vote for your favorite WTFs to help the community bubble up the best ones. Jump in!

The Low Authority Group (3-9 blogs linking in the last 6 months)

The average blog age (the number of days that the blog has been in existence) is about 228 days, which shows a real commitment to blogging. However, bloggers of this type average only 12 posts per month, meaning that their posting habits are generally dedicated but infrequent.

The Middle Authority Group (10-99 blogs linking in the last 6 months)

This contrasts somewhat with the second group, which enjoys an average age not much older than the first at 260 days and which posts 50% more frequently than the first. There is a clear correlation between posting volume and Technorati authority ranking.

The High Authority Group (100-499 blogs linking in the last 6 months)

The third group represents a decided shift in blog age while not blogging much more frequently than the last. In keeping with the theme of the maturation of the blogosphere, it seems evident that many of these bloggers were previously in category two and have grown in authority organically over time. In other words, sheer dedication pays off over time.

The Very High Authority Group (500 or more blogs linking in the last 6 months)

In the final group we see what might be considered the blogging elite. This group, which represents more than 4,000 blogs, exhibits a radical shift in post frequency as well as blog age. Bloggers of this type have been at it longer - a year and a half on average - and post nearly twice a day, an increase in posting volume of over 100% from the previous group. Many of the blogs in this category, in fact, are about as old as Technorati and we've grown up together. Some of these are full-fledge professional enterprises that post many, many times per day and behave increasingly like our friends in the mainstream media. As has been widely reported, the impact of these bloggers on our cultures and democracies is increasingly dramatic.

"A year ago, brands were saying, 'Oh no, not the blogosphere,'" said Peter Hirshberg, chief executive of Technorati, a blog-tracking service that last week, in partnership with Edelman, provided results of a global survey of blog use. "Now they're saying, 'Great, this is an opportunity.'"

In other words, the numbers in the green box reflect activity in the last 180 days, while the number of links directly below the green box is the total for as long as we have data.

The 180-day window means that ranks and link counts go up and down. Some bloggers see their counts rise steadily when others link to their blog. In the chart below, we see 200 days of linking to www.perezhilton.com. For purposes of ranking and comparison, we count only those links in the last 180 days (those in the red box.) Perez' counts are going up. Yay!

Technorati has been tracking the blogosphere, or world of weblogs, since November 2002, and I'm constantly amazed at the growth over the years. The blogosphere has been doubling in size every 6 months or so. It is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.

Whenever I write about these statistics, I'm always asked by people, "Can it continue to grow this quickly?" Frankly, I can't possibly imagine it continuing to grow at this pace - after all, there are only so many human beings in the world! It has to slow down.

Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.

The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.

Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.

From January 2004 until July 2006, the number of blogs that Technorati tracks has continued to double every 5-7 months.

About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 blogs created each second of each day.

About 8% of new blogs get past Technorati's filters, even if it is only for a few hours or days.

About 70% of the pings Technorati receives are from known spam sources, but we drop them before we have to send out a spider to go and index the splog.

Total posting volume of the blogosphere continues to rise, showing about 1.6 Million postings per day, or about 18.6 posts per second.

This is about double the volume of about a year ago.

The most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster has arrived and we have all been taken to planet Zeus 94 to kneel before Zod. All this is a little much for us to handle at the moment so come back later please. And leave a quarter in the collection tray on your way out.

When readers visit an AP member Web site that uses AP Hosted Custom News, they will see a module featuring the "Top Five Most Blogged About" AP articles right next to the article text, dynamically powered by Technorati. Additionally, when readers click on an AP article, Technorati will deliver "Who's Blogging About" that article. Now, if you have commentary about an AP story, you can get mentioned in that module simply by linking to that AP news URL, akin to what you can do with Washington Post articles, Newsweek articles, Der Spiegel articles, and a host of other media partners that currently work with Technorati.

Anyone who wants to comment on a media story can have their thoughts available to readers globally, not just on a single site, but through an entire world of syndicated media. This move is particularly important as it is not just on a single newspaper, but covering the links that hit a story at any point in the news syndication process. Technorati's initiatives - and their uptake by mainstream media - are making the system into a tightly enmeshed collaborative space for identifying and disseminating news through society.

Those of you paying attention to the Technorati 100 will have noticed that it is getting more international, due to the explosion of non-English blogs as Dave noted in State of the Blosphere. With today's update, the number one spot has changed from Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin and friends to ?? ??? ??BLOG by Xu Jing Lei. Evidently a name starting with X is a big help -- perhaps Xiaxue will be next?