All Healthy Ecosystems have Parasites

That’s what Founder and former Technorati CEO David Sifry said when asked to comment about the latest numbers and development in the blogosphere.

Apparently, there’s a huge spike in the number of spammers that even the blog search engine Technorati is swarmed by them. More than 99% of all pings and updates to the search engines are spam. {source: BW}

Despite the over-all count of 112.8 Million blogs on Technorati’s index, only 11% of them are active (have had any blog updates in the last 60 days). However, new bogs have grown three-folds from 40,000 new ones each day back in 2005 to over 120,000 each day now. And yes, that does not count the splogs.

What interests me the most is the 89% inactivity rate. Almost 9 out of 10 bloggers are inactive or stopped blogging altogether, and that percentage can be applied to any sub-niche or region. It seems to be a pretty high number though.

My other concern is spam. At 99+%, this could be a much, much bigger problem in the future. It could crash systems and make blog services bow down on its knees. Will spam kill blogging eventually? Well, parasites cannot live without its host but it can transfer to another host too.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

9 Comments

Lester Cavestany says:

17 years ago

9 out of 10. That’s a very high “mortality” rate. I wonder what the statistics are like in the Philippines?
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LiNTEK says:

17 years ago

I doubt that spam will eventually kill blogging as most of blog providers like WordPress has been persistent on fighting this mess in the form of software updates. well…. I could be wrong…..

What concerns me is the 9 out of 10 mortality rate, its very unusual and is very high.
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jhay says:

17 years ago

Akismet needs to really improve, my comments still are mistaken as spam for almost a week now. :(
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Eugene says:

17 years ago

I have the same problem as Jhay. It seems that Akismet is tagging the DSL IP address I’m on as a spam source.
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CallCenterVet says:

17 years ago

I’ve seen people start a blog, go about it for a couple of weeks or so then get tired of it. I guess it’s not for everybody so it seems.

I think technorati should purge blogs that are inactive for about 6 months already. That seems to be a fair deal. It won’t get rid of everything but at least there’s something in place to curb the spamming before it even gets to unmanageable numbers.
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Lyle, RN says:

17 years ago

9 out of 10? I didn’t know it was that bad.

Blog platforms like blogger and wordpress should have a policy where inactive blogs are automatically deleted by the system.
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JC John SESE Cuneta says:

17 years ago

“Despite the over-all count of 112.8 Million blogs on Technoratiâ€™s index, only 11% of them are active (have had any blog updates in the last 60 days).”

If Technorati is basing their ‘active’ figures on the number of blogs that pinged them last 60 days, well that’s very far from the truth. Technorati’s ping started to fail mid of 2007 and they still do not want to admit it.

I gave up on them myself, bad customer service at that… or whatever customer service they have.

They can remove all the blogs that did not ping them from the last 60 days and so, but they should be prepared with thousands of angry blog posts because their ping doesn’t work at all for the majority.
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Navtej Kohli says:

17 years ago

Its not only about the comment spam but its about overall SPING
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Sumiya Pervin says:

8 years ago

Hi ,i have a spam problem.How can i comment avoid spam, explain please?
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