Technorati’s Dave Sifry has released the first part of his latest “State of the Blogosphere,” which (he reports) is 60 times bigger than it was in 2003. Among the more interesting results is the fact that 13.7 million bloggers are still posting items three months after launching their blogs. While there are still plenty of people who start a blog on a whim but don’t follow through, the numbers suggest that there also are plenty of people committed to maintaining their sites.

Also, more people are tagging their posts. One of the arguments against the Structured Blogging Initiative is that people won’t take the time to add the tags necessary to make the concept work. However, Technorati’s research suggests 81 million posts have been tagged since January 2005, and the number grows by 400,000 tagged posts every day. Maybe people just want their posts to be found.

Technorati is tracking 27.2 million blogs, with a new blog created every second, maintaining the pace reported four months ago. About 9% of those new blogs are spam or machine generated, which is discouraging but still leaves 91% of new blogs created by a human being with some ambition to communicate something.

Tomorrow, Sifry will continue his “State of the Blogosphere” with an entry titled, “Going beyond search and tags, to discovery.”