As measured by traffic rankings from Alexa, per January 2008. Let me know if your have updates. (Via Scampblog)

Whatever your opinion is about John McCain’s pick for Vice President of the United States – but Sarah Palin from Alaska certainly gets a lot of coverage from the blogosphere.

According to blog engine Technorati the term “Sarah Palin” has been mentioned over 10,000 times in blogs (of any language) on the day when the news of her nomination as VP broke. Since then the buzz only got slightly smaller. Prediction: There is more to come..

(By the way: The following chart is based on a neat Technorati ‘tool’ which can be embed in to your blog post for any search term. It also updates the data on a daily basis.)

Posts that contain Sarah Palin per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

There is nothing which can stop the growing popularity of blogs. U.S. consumers are not only increasingly passionate blog authors, but also rely more often on blogs in their daily news consumption. Emarketer writes in its report:

Once a haven for techies, there are now blogs for everything from celebrity gossip to political commentary to the most mundane personal minutiae. By 2012, more than 145 million people – or 67% of the US Internet population—will be reading blogs at least once per month.

More interesting findings:

- The number of people creating blogs in the US will also grow, reaching 34.7 million people by 2011 – 16% of the Internet population.
- There were some 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007, a number that correlates to 12% of Internet users.

11.6%
Percentage of Fortune 500 companies with active business blogs.
(Source: Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki)