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In the past month, the Internet has spawned another 3.5 million websites, bringing the total volume to more than 100 million, according to web research specialist Netcraft.

So far this year, an additional 27.4 million sites have appeared on the net, which is a significant increase on 2005's growth of 17 million.

Business and consumer interest in creating and consuming blogs thanks to the surge in free-blogging

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offerings from the likes of Google and Microsoft has spurred the growth, the research found.

Technorati, which monitors the blogosphere, also backs up these findings with its own statistics.

According to the blog expert, which currently tracks 58.8 million blogs, some 175,000 new blogs are created each day. Its figures show that the blogging community posts a combined total of more than 1.6 million new entries daily, which are updated around 18 times a second.

In addition to users' growing fondness for blogging, an increasing small business web presence has also contributed to the online boom.

As a result of these trends, the internet has doubled in size since May 2004.

However, just under half of sites identified have been labelled as inactive by Netcraft's monthly web survey.

As yet, the reasons behind this lack of activity remain unclear.