David Sifry has the latest installment of State of the Blogosphere reports ready for our perusal and commentary.
Let's just start with the top-line summary:
- As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs
- The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
- The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
- About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
- About a new weblog is created each second
- 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
- Between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts are made each day
- About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
- An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average
Not bad! Oh yeah, blogs are a fad ... Not! Fine, enough cheerleading. The important parts of this post is the attention paid to splogs (spam blogs). Steve zeros in on this and I think I will continue from this morning's discussion that I've already posted.
Note the red sections of the next two charts. I'm going to keep them full-size so you can see the detail:
According to Technorati, then, splogs are the huge plague that they seem to be. I disagree, to a degree. I agree that the majority of blogs and blog posts out there aren't splogs and don't generate comment spam or trackback spam, etc. Fine. But I also think Technorati is under counting, 
David to his credit acknowledges this, and I am more concerned with the fact that the red portions started recently and don't seem to be slowing. Of course it is hard to quantify the rate of splogs and splog posts because a big news item will swamp them out (which is a good thing). I am also concerned that sploggers will use available tool to see that something on is hot on the blogosphere and spam targeted to that. What if all our efforts for Katrina were matched 2 for 1 with splog? These are bots, they can be switched on and off. Cranked up and down. That worries me.
Splogs are like crime stats. People read about them and get scared to go out at night. The chances of them actually becoming a victim of crime might be low, but the perception that they will be is enough. Same goes for splogs. The perception that they are gaining a foothold threatens this nascent phenomenon. The perception might be enough to cool things. I'm glad that Blogger, TuCows, Six Apart, WP, and other are working towards real solutions. Because we don't want to be reading in a few months how ineffective blog search is because it's filled with spam like our e-mail inboxes are now. Because that would be a shame.
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