Technorati is a wonderful resource for bloggers. If you have not yet discovered it or do not use it much, take the time now to investigate what it offers. It tracks and indexes currently more than 51 million blogs and gives you several ways to discover new blogs and to follow the stats and conversation about your blog and other blogs you follow.

There is currently some debate as to how accurate this figure of 51 million blogs is. Certainly Technorati does not index all public blogs; the actual number of public blogs is far higher. There are also of course millions of private or internal blogs. On the other hand, of the 51 million it does track, many have not been updated for some time or have been abandoned or were set up for experimental purposes or to squat on a batch of sub-domain names, so the number of active blogs is far fewer.

Technorati ranks blogs by authority, calculating the rank for each blog primarily on the number of other blogs that link to it, then I think on a combination of the number of posts that link to it and the frequency and recency of posts on the blog. Check out a few blogs that show “0 blogs link here” and you will find that the rank is the same for each – currently around 1.5 million. This tells me there are, in fact, only 1.5 million blogs that others find interesting. That’s an awful lot of bloggers out there talking to themselves.