In late 2005 and earlier 2006, I wrote three pieces on the state of the splogosphere, which were basically an enumeration of how splogging was destroying the blogosphere. In the six months since my last piece, the percentage of blogs that are splogs is on the decline and major blogging platforms (Blogspot) have done a great job of cleaning up their act. A big congratulations go to Technorati and Google blog search, which has considerably improved their splog detection.

Early splogosphere growth occurred on hosted blogging platforms, like Blogspot. Lately, splogs are mostly found on self-hosted blogging platforms, primarily Wordpress. This has moved the fight against splogs from the domain of blog hosting services, to the domain of blog aggregation services and blog search engines.

If you compare the growth of email spam to the growth of blog spam, then you'll see two completely different curves. Email spam, even after years of growth, is still growing, whereas blog spam has already peaked. The difference is that email hubs are mostly controlled by large corporations and government, which are not quick to react and spammers easily out-maneuver them. On the other hand, the blogosphere hubs are controlled by small and nimble companies (Google was a start-up on 5 years ago, Technorati, Wordpress), which are capable of keeping up and even out-maneuvering spammers.

But now, the spammers have turned their attention to another hole in the blogosphere; comment spam. Comment spam is completely out of control lately. In fact, I'm considering revising my comment posting rules to automatically queue any comments that contain URLs for moderation. I don't want to do this because my moderation-less comment system is quite popular and I don't want to hamper that popularity and my AdSense earnings.

Previous State of the Splogosphere articles...

• State of the Splogosphere, Part I
• State of the Splogosphere, Part II
• State of the Splogosphere, Part III