LiveJournal grows 14 percent in two months.
LiveJournal.com reports 484,871 active users, up 14 percent in the 60 days since my 11 March post. This run rate, compounded, doubles yearly.
Blogstreet is an automated blog directory; it's recent growth is amazing too. 107k blogs as of 17 March, up 27 percent to 136,106.
Technorati, watching 100,683 blogs as of 5 March, now watches 286,847. Nearly three-fold growth in two months.
I can explain the community crawlers: they'll grow quickly until they saturate the public, connected blogosphere. (They obviously don't see private blogspaces behind government or corporate firewalls. Nor do they see isolated, unlinked pockets.)
That doesn't explain the LiveJournal growth. Is there a meme attracting new bloggers? LiveJournal is no longer free, so new people are paying to post. Or it may be returnees from the inactive lists, coming in from the cold.
update: LiveJournal's Jesse Proulx writes:
Over the past 60 days some of the activity gain can be attributed to more press exposure than usual, but the majority mostly comes from the normal widespread distribution of LiveJournals through cliques and groups of friends. Also, roughly 1 in 10 of our accounts are "community" accounts, and most personal accounts are members of at least one of these communities. One new account added to the site raises the activity rate slightly, but communities raise the rate more significantly, and also attract more accounts.Before we went to the invitation/pay only system, both our activity rates and number of accounts doubled every few months, so this growth rate is actually the mildest we've seen in the history of the site.
