Blogs are growing faster than ever, with more than 50,000 non-spam blog-posts every hour; also on the rise are spam-blogs and blog-posts with categorizing tags. Every three months, Technorati founder David Sifry publishes his "State of the Blogosphere" memo, which exposes some of the intelligence gleaned by analyzing the index of blog posts accumulated by the Technorati blog-search service. Part one of this quarter's report has just gone live:
There has been an increase in the overall noise level in the blogosphere, most notably in the number of spam and fake pings that are sent – what I call "spings". These spam pings are fake or bogus notifications that a blog has been updated; in some cases, these spings can amount to a denial-of-service attack, and can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total pings Technorati receives. However, we've built a sophisticated system that mitigates the spings, and helps to keep spam blogs out of our indexes. Beyond that, about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud. Technorati continues to take an ecosystem approach to solving this problem, working closely with other players like Amazon, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Drupal, Google, MSN, Six Apart, Tucows, WordPress and Yahoo, and there will be another Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit this spring, building on the success of the previous two summits.
(Disclosure: I am a proud advisor to Technorati, Inc.)
