Dave Sifry of Technorati hasn't quite received the usual attention for his latest quarterly "state of the blog nation" missive to the world. Time was when we hung breathless to see just how many blogs were out there and how much deathless prose and poetry was being unleashed on the world.
But now? The lack of attention is possibly because Technorati hasn't quite set the real world on fire - nor been bought by a bigger company - as perhaps he would have hoped. (Though we still use it every week to track pingbacks on Tech stories. It's good stuff.)
But now BusinessWeek has been talking to him again, to see what the latest take is. The remarkable thing is the amount of spam.
Back when we wrote the cover story [in 2005], there were some 9 million blogs, with about 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Now, says Sifry, Technorati indexes 112 million blogs, with 120,000 new ones appearing each day. And that's not including spam blogs. [ My emphasis - CA] They were barely on the horizon in spring of '05, and now they account for — get this — well over 99% of all the pings and updates pouring into Technorati's servers.
99%. That's a lot of junk floating around. Even more than email spam, it's easy to create splogs - and easy to use Google's AdSense to make money from them, as we've explained before. The question is, do the advertisers have any control over their appearance on these useless sites? Do they pay?
Sifry's comment? "All healthy ecosystems have parasites." I'm not sure if it's that healthy when the parasites make up 99% of the activity, though.
