Following Julie's keynote, Tim Bray interviews Technorati founder and CEO David Sifry to discuss the state of the blogosphere. He spent much of the beginning discussing his
recent post on the statistics of the blogosphere. Some of the highlights are:
- Technorati currently tracks 27.2 million blogs and doubles every 5 and a half months
- The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was 3 years ago
- 2.7 million bloggers update their blog at least weekly and there's abuot 50,000 posts per hour
Those statistics are part 1 on the state of the blogosphere so presumably, we can expect more statistics in the near future.
David Sifry also discussed some of the problems plaguing the blogosphere including the proliferation of spam blogs. Spam blogs started making an appearance in July 2004 and can be broken into two types: keyword stuffing and the second is scrapping the content of other people's blogs. Both achieve the goal of attracting people to the site where they can make money off of ad sense. David says that although technology plays a strong role in combatting spam blogs, the real solution is to get down into the economics and as such they have worked with affiliates like Google and Amazon to shut down their accounts.
On a closely related topic, he discussed a strategy used by spammers called google bowling. To make their site rise to the top rankings in search engine, they create spam blogs linking to sites that rank above them, tricking the search engines to blacklist the linked site. Talk about malicious!
He also touched upon the idea of net neutrality, a concept that says there should be neutral access to different networks (i.e. you get charged the same rate for surfing no matter what site you visit). i haven't heard much about this issue but Dave says it is up to us to ensure it stays neutral.
It was quite an interesting interview!
Northern Voice Technorati DavidSifry spam blogosphere