Webs of trust help us navigate the rising seas of blog content

David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, has a terrific article today on the growth of blogs and blog content over the past eight months. Highlights of the data include:

• Technorati now tracks over 27.2 Million blogs


• The blogosphere is doubling in size every 5 and a half 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


• 13.7 million bloggers are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created


• Spings (Spam Pings) can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total daily pings Technorati receives


• Sophisticated spam management tools eliminate the spings and find that about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated


• Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour


• Over 81 Million posts with tags since January 2005, increasing by 400,000 per day


• Blog Finder has over 850,000 blogs, and over 2,500 popular categories have attracted a critical mass of topical bloggers

So if you are feeling overwhelmed by information from the Internet -- the tyranny of too much -- now you know why. But it also explains the rise of meta-news sites like Google News, Digg.com, Memeorandum.com, and Newsvine.com. People are looking for ways to navigate this ever-growing sea of information; these sites are trying to provide landmarks and popular routes.

But even more important here from a human psychology and communication point of view is the growing amount of content being attributed to people instead of organizations. As people become overwhelmed by information, they look for other people they trust to guide them through the confusion. In fact, peers are rapidly replacing institutions and authority figures like CEOs as the most trusted sources of information, according to Edelman Worldwide. We are all forging webs of trust with people more than technology to find our way through this flood of information.

My advice: Now is the time to start building your personal network of peers to guide you through today's new media world. As you sort through the countless new information sources and technologies, give special consideration to those sites and systems that emphasize human voices and distillation of information instead of pure aggregation of ever more content. It doesn't matter whether it's Walter Mossberg at the Wall Street Journal, John Gruber at DaringFireball.com, or Scott Karp over at Publishing 2.0; spend more time identifying the people you trust and using them as guides to what's important. With our media seas doubling in depth every six months, it's these personal voices who are the life preservers that will keep us from drowning in information.

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Daring Fireball, Edelman, Opinion, Publishing 2.0, Technorati, Tyranny of too much, Walt Mossberg, Web, Web 2.0, Web of trust