Perseus Development Corporation announced earlier today that their recently completed blog survey shows that 31.6MM blogs have been created to date; further, they project 53.4MM blogs by the end of the year. These numbers don't exactly jive with other blog market data we've seen over the past month or two.

Shades of PEW and the hyped Podcasting numbers?

I don't think so... Here, it seems much more likely that new and existing bloggers are sampling a variety of publishing platforms before picking a home, much as we saw with the various social networking sites.

While I can't prove this, I can tell you that most everyone I know who blogs regularly has "their blog", an MSN Spaces blog, and, as of a week or so ago, a Yahoo 360 blog. (I have all of those plus the remnants of this blog that still lives on BlogSpot, and, an AOL Journals blog. Oh yeah, I also have a couple of test blogs on BlogSpot for experimenting, plus a resume/bio blog.)

Also, let's not forget that the automated creation of Spam Blogs, which is also likely fueling this "growth" (see post on Google adding a Captcha, and Rafer's comment).

But, hey, here's to hoping they're right...