Well the answer to the above questions is provided by the latest August 2006 State of the Blogosphere which says 175,000 new weblogs are created each day (or more than 2 blogs per second) with 1.6 Million postings per day (or about 18.6 posts per second) and this is about double the volume of about a year ago. Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs and the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
They also point that the most prevalent times for English-language posting is between the hours of 10AM and 2PM Pacific time, with an additional spike at around 5PM Pacific time. While Technorati is tracking all this in the background, there are more reasons why you need a technorati account.