16 February, 2006 - 8:33am

David Sifry's new State of the Blogosphere report finds that the blogosphere is continuing to double approximately every six months, and now numbers 27.2 million blogs. This makes the blogosphere 60 times larger than it was three years ago, with a new weblog being created every second! The downside to the massive growth is the notable increase in spam and fake pings or "spings".

He discovered that fake spam pings account for as much as 60% of the total pings that Technorati receives. Clearly, bringing reputation and identity to the blogosphere is needed in order to solve this problem. Our upcoming release of sxore, will help blog publishers, by preventing comment and trackback spam and enabling reputation aggregation.

Technorati is also coming out with a new authority system for those engaged in blog searching. Their "Filter By Authority" slider makes it easy to refine a search and look for either a wider array of thoughts and opinions, or to narrow the search to only bloggers that have lots of other people linking to them.