The blogs are pinging for me and my gal.

Ross Mayfield, 14 April 2003:

The number of weblogs grew 400% since this week last year. See the analysis by Tim Jarrett (stats in a Microsoft Excel file) at Jarrett House North for a more complete picture built with Weblogs.com data.

Jarrett reports on an increase in the number of blogs sending update notices ("pings") to the weblogs.com server. I see four explanations:

1. More weblogs are equipped with an automatic pinging tool
2. More posts per person per day
3. More posts clustered around a peak time zone
4. More weblogs

Insufficient data to tell those causes apart.