Technorati, a weblog tracking service, recently reported that the number of blogs online doubles every five months. This led technology reporter Michael S. Malone to wonder whether blogs are subject to Moore’s Law.

What’s Moore’s Law?

Whenever you hear the word “doubling” related to anything high tech, the first thing that comes to mind is the Law of Laws in the digital world: Moore’s Law of Semiconductors. I probably don’t have to remind you of what it says: the performance of semiconductor devices doubles every two years.

Gordon Moore, one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley and a co-founder of both Fairchild and Intel, came up with this “law” in the mid-1960s while preparing for an industry speech. Basically, he tracked the capacity of all of his company’s memory chips up until that date ... and discovered, to his astonishment, that they made a straight line on a sheet of log paper. He then took a chance and predicted that this trajectory might be maintained for a few more years.

I saw Gordon make a follow-up presentation in the late 1970s. He was still amazed: the chart now included logic chips, memory chips and even microprocessors — and yet the semiconductor world was still clicking along at this mind-boggling pace, doubling performance every 18-24 months. And it worked along multiple axes: hold performance constant, and chip prices halved every couple years. Hold those two variables steady and chips got smaller at the same rate.

Malone cites former Intel CEO Andy Grove, who argued that industries can achieve faster advancement as they adopt more technology:

[W]henever you could find something that could be managed by digital systems — not an automobile but an engine computer, not a doctor but patient diagnostic and monitoring equipment, not a chromosome but gene mapping — it was like strapping that industry to a comet. Almost overnight the rate of change literally became exponential, improvements asymptotic, and miracles began to occur.

So, will Moore’s Law affect online media like blogs? Malone seems to think so:

That’s why we in the tech industry have become very attuned to the doubling curve. Whenever and wherever it pops up, we pay a lot of attention. And now, here it is, not surprisingly, characterizing the blogosphere. After all, the world of blogs has gotten a lot of early-PC and early dot.com attention over the last year, becoming one of those hot terms that everyone is using, and the tech playground towards which all of the usual early adapters have raced. It has also had some big early victories (pulling down Dan Rather, stealing readers from newspapers and television, setting much of the debate in the last presidential election), and it is beginning to show some of the early signs of consolidation (TechCentral Station, Pajama Media), the creation of larger and better-funded enterprises (Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere), industry organizations and conferences, and a growing support infrastructure (from search engines like Technorati, to free blogging services from the likes of AOL and MSN).

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All of this suggests that the blogosphere is, like those other industries and professions under the regime of Moore’s Law, ripe for investment, for miracles and for the creation of great fortunes. When? There’s the real question. The PC industry ran for a long time under Moore’s Law before it finally found its destiny with the Apple II. Until then, a lot of very smart people devoted a lot of their lives and imaginations to personal computing with little in the bank to show for it.