In the most recent installment of Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, Dave Sifry enlightens us to not only the growth statistics of weblogs, but also offers a little more insight as to the nature of the spam beast. Spam pings (spings) present the latest challenge to keeping Technorati’s index uncluttered.
As of February, Technorati reports that it is tracking some 27.2 million blogs in a blogosphere that continues to double every 5 and a half months, making it over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago.
On average a new blog is created every second of every day with about half of those bloggers committing to update their corner of cyberspace three months after creation. About 1.2 million new posts are created daily, or about 50,000 per hour.
In short, that’s a lot of blogs.
The explosive success of the blogosphere was quick to attract the spam networks. Free to set up, operate, and put advertising on, spam blogs (splogs) were bound to appear.
Technorati says about nine percent of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or attempts to build link farms or capitalize on click fraud. Nine percent doesn’t sound like much until you realize that’s over 7500 new splogs a day.
Sifry coined a new term with the report. Spings, or spam pings, are becoming an increasingly large minefield to step through. A ping is sent out from blogs to notify when it has been updated.
Spings account for as much 60% of the total pings Technorati receives. Sifry says the Technorati team has been working with Amazon, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Drupal, Google, MSN, Six Apart, Tucows, WordPress and Yahoo! to help control the splog and sping problems.
Technnorati, along with the others mentioned will be meeting in California at the Web Spam Squashing Summit later this week to address ways to combat spam, splogs, spings, and other abuses.
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