The last time I wrote about comment spam was in April, when I received maybe five to ten such submissions per week. In the final months of 2008 that number is up to something like five to ten per day. There’s no good reason why this should be — as you may have noticed, the second half of the year has been observably less bloggy than the first, and notwithstanding a few spiky links from big traffic-drivers, the daily visitor count has been at best unpromising. So why the surge?

My guess is that unsophisticated pliers of the trade have become a little more sophisticated, and so must be trying — and failing — more often and in greater numbers. I don’t think these are the Russo-Turkic schemers akin to Jonathan Franzen’s Gitanas Misevicius. Much of that, I believe, now defaults to spam filters.

Instead, these comments make it all the way to the moderation queue and seem to come from native English-speakers who have a website to promote, know a little bit about how search engines work, and aim to elevate the PageRank of their meager obsessions (or unwitting clients) in the sections of a blog they found on Google or Technorati. My blog, in fact.

And sometimes they come back. Earlier today, an algorithmic process denied a now-deleted comment access to my latest post, about the Phillips Foundation’s Journalism Fellowship Program. It went something like:

Grants to become a journalist, what’s next, grants to become a lawyer?

Not exactly a constructive comment, but snarky enough to wave through… except for the business e-mail account and URL of said business pasted into the address field. And the business? A Welsh company selling organic meat (a tautology, if you ask me) on the open Interwebs.

I hadn’t even noticed it until I received an angry e-mail from the bon mot’s possessive owner, someone whom I’d wager fits the above description. In the interests of unusually equal amusement, here’s the e-mail exchange in full:

In retrospect, I believe he was genuinely confused by the phrase “SEO strategy” — after all, if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t have left a comment in the first place.

P.S. And to my erstwhile correspondent: If you leave a comment this time, what the heck: I’ll give you one free non-piscatory fish out of the Akismet spam filter.

Update: In case you’re wondering, “I love reading Blog P.I. because…” is the default opening line if you start from the Contact page. And speaking of defaults, I wish WordPress wouldn’t promise that the “blog admin … will be able to restore it immediately.” I’ll decide when I’m able to restore it.

N.B. The title is a reference to DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America. Beyond the explicit nod to “The Corrections”, I count at least three more literary references that I swear were not premeditated.

It made sense, though. The bloggers who show up on Techmeme are much more likely to track themselves on that site than are the bloggers who populate Memeorandum likely to watch themselves. Of couse, all tech bloggers are geeks in good standing, while only some of us political types are. So they get the goodies first.

But as expected, Rivera rolled out his Memeorandum Leaderboard, and he did so this week. As he explained, the Leaderboard

identifies 100 of [the most influential political blogs], ranking sources simply by how much they’ve appeared on memeorandum in the past month. It updates every 20 minutes and offers archives of past days. … The memeorandum Leaderboard doesn’t tell the whole story of course. For instance, influential curators of opinion like Instapundit.com don’t figure highly given memeorandum’s preference for longer articles. Yet it remains a handy portal to many of the sources with the greatest role in framing and shaping the national debate.

It’s handy, all right, and it fills a need. Five years ago, in a very different political blogosphere, The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem was the definitive guide to the top political blogs. But with Rob Neppell (née N.Z. Bear) now focused on other projects, it’s fallen into obsolescence. The Technorati Top 100 was a welcome addition, but its inbound link counts were sometimes unreliable, it never focused on politics per se, and as I pointed out last year, the political blogs have to share the top 100 with many other genres. Since then, Technorati has lost its direction in other ways, and it’s too soon to tell whether founding CEO Dave Sifry’s departure will change things. I’m not counting on it.

So while Rivera’s list is worth analyzing, it should come as no surprise that the analysis so far has come from more tech-centric bloggers. For example, here’s TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley marveling at how important the legacy media remains, especially compared to the ’sphere in which he moves:

According to the list, based on story headlines on Memeorandum the New York Times, Washington Post and AP control over 22.4% of political headlines. The Atlantic Online, The National Review and CNN (twice) also make the top ten, leaving slim pickings for political blogs. … The (perhaps sad) state of the political blogosphere stands in contrast to the tech blogosphere, which dominates the equivalent Techmeme Leaderboard list, holding approx 64% of all spots.

The observation is fair, but I object to the judgment call. For one thing, defining the subject matter of Memeorandum as “politics” is far too narrow. Foreign affairs, U.S. diplomacy, domestic policy, electoral politics and sundry current events make up the subject matter at Memeorandum — a much broader spectrum of news and analysis than what TechMeme covers. Moreover, these subjects often require reporting from around the country and around the world that even in the digital age aged institutions with more resources than resolve continue to dominate. Most of the stories on TechMeme emanate from the Silicon Valley; Memeorandum spans the world at large.

GOP Internet consultant Patrick Ruffini has already taken a crack at evaluating what it says about the Right’s online fortunes. What it says is that Republicans and conservatives need to reinvent their online channels of communication:

Lots of bloggers have been over to Iraq, a commitment which makes the professional activists in the leftosphere look like dilettantes. Guys like Jeff [Emanuel], Bill Roggio, and Michael Yon have been the advance guard for this stuff. But nothing little has been done to institutionalize their work, to create counter-memes by controlling the upstream information flow through a system for nurturing these upstart war reporters. The failure to develop an effective counter-narrative out of Iraq is reflective of the “conservative message machine” and its reluctance to think outside the box.

Myself, I’m still thinking it over. To get started on the process, I separated all the websites on this afternoon’s Leaderboard into a few arbitrary categories and added up the percentages accorded to each. I then created a simple chart with Zoho Sheet (beating out Google Docs by a slim margin and NeoOffice by a much wider one) to visualize the statistical spread. Others will have different ways of breaking this out — and I may have different ways at a later date — but here’s what I came up with:

I should note the numbers taken off the leaderboard do not actually add up to 100%. That’s something I intend to ask Rivera about, and because the Zoho chart rounds them up to reach a sensible 100%, here are the actual numbers as I compiled them:

This dilutes MSM-owned websites only just a bit; as you can see, print and wire-based news stories commanded much, much more attention than websites based on television news, so you can squint and add that back in if you’d like. Add in MSM-created content specifically for the web, and it’s up over 60%. That is also a more arbitrary but, I would argue, more necessary category — “MSM Online” is where I placed any ostensibly non-partisan blog and any non-blog content by more partisan sources. These days established media organizations are creating more and more content for the web, and much of it differs in character from what they publish on dead trees. Liberal and Conservative blogs are more self-explanatory; the hard-to-categorize sites included Drudge Report and The Moderate Voice. The Primary Sources were Gallup, Rasmussen and whitehouse.gov. If anybody cares, I can forward the list as I compiled it. It could probably use some revision, and I certainly reserve the right to have made a clerical error here or there.

I’ll leave you that to chew over for now. I’ll be back with answers when I have them, and with any luck, I will be back inside of a month with a few more thoughts about what all is going on here.

April 2007: 70 million blogs

The latest State of the Blogosphere report from Dave Sifry at Technorati came out last week. He also calls it “State of the Live Web,” which either sounds like he’s trying to get acquired by Microsoft or retiring the word “blogosphere” (don’t tell Bill Quick).

As always, Sifry places great emphasis on how many blogs Technorati is “tracking.” In October 2004, when Sifry first issued his report, it was 4 million. Now it’s 70 million.

In last October’s report — when Blog P.I. analyzed the distribution of blog types in the Technorati Top 100 — it was a mere 57 million.

In that report and (if memory serves) that report alone, Sifry offered a more interesting finding:

About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months.

When you think of how many people have started blogs and then abandoned them, moved from one platform to another, or even kept multiple blogs open for various purposes, 55% is surprisingly high. Regardless, I did the math and concluded that the number of active blogs, using Sifry’s loose definition of “active,” was closer to 33 million.

If we assume that the number is still somewhere around 55%, then there are currently some 38.5 million blogs that meet at least some kind of semi-active status.

Sifry does offer the number of blog postings for particular periods, but he does not specifically include this number in this report — though a German blogger and a French blogger clamor for it in the comments — and he hasn’t previously offered further breakdowns: How many blogs have updated in the past month? Week? 24 hours?

These numbers would tell us a lot more about how big the blogosphere is than the supposedly awe-inspiring but mostly skepticism-inducing count 70 million “tracked.” Yes, we know what Technorati is doing, but since you’re in a position to tell us, how many active blogs are there really?

P.S. Jordan McCullum at Marketing Pilgrim tried crunching the numbers another way:

We know that popular blogs can post multiple times per day, anywhere from 5 to 20—and other active blogs may post only once every few days or once a week. If we took a stab in the dark and said that the average was once every three days (skewed to the right by the high number of “less active” blogs), that would mean that only 4.5 million of the 70 million blogs out there are “active,” or 6%. Seems a bit low, wouldn’t you say?

On any given day? That would be 11.7% of the blogs updated in the past three months. Sounds plausible to me, but only Dave Sifry knows for sure.

“[C]learly the Facebook organizing is working.” Who said this? No peeking at Technorati!

Consider, the news articles linked above were to the Des Moines Register and Manchester Union Leader, neither of which mentioned Facebook. Neither did the rest of the post. And not to belabor the point, but none of the above mentioned any specific turnout by college students.

Here’s Not Paul Begala and yours truly, just a little while ago:

So, who is actually responsible for this incredibly sloppy bit of blogosphere triumphalism? The answer is embedded somewhere in this post. If nobody guesses (or Technoratis) correctly by Friday, Blog P.I. will provide the answer in this space.

Update: Congratulations to JeffL for correctly guessing (or Googling) the answer. Congratulations are also due to Timothy for finding the embedded answer. You should all feel… like you read blogs too much.

So what happened here? Let’s turn to Technorati.

The common link in all of our posts was to the fifth page of the article, and Sullivan was clearly first. As my post from yesterday should indicate, I found it on his site. I assume the others did as well, a possible exception being Bowers (being the lone netrooter in the group, and the only one not to mention Obama’s swipe at Daily Kos). How did Sullivan find it? Most likely from one of his ubiquitous e-mail tipsters.

And just to be sure, the story is indeed from October. It’s dated the 2nd of that month, and the last sentence of the article’s first page notes that Obama’s new book “will be hitting bookstores in mid-October.”

Searching for links to the article’s first page at Technorati, it appears the article was largely overlooked. The only well-known site to link at the time was Bloggingheads. That week’s ‘heads, Eric Alterman and Mickey Kaus, barely mentioned it, and none of them singled out the Kos reference.

So why did it escape unmentioned until now? That I cannot answer. This episode might put the lie to the notion that political bloggers will turn up every last relevant tidbit from the news. Or at least that they’ll do so immediately — eventually, it did make the rounds. And, of course, it’s probably of interest only to those of us who spend much of our time in the political blogosphere to begin with. Compare: a few days after the original Lee Bandy report, Joe Biden’s latest “Trent Lott” moment is generating bipartisan outrage — albeit limited, so far.

Back to New York and Obama, credit goes to Central Sanity, who linked the story yesterday for different reasons, and led with:

This article from New York Magazine is apparently about two months old, but it’s still a worthwhile look into the mind of the U.S. Senator from Illinois.

It may be a blogosphere cliché, but it’s still good advice — read the whole thing.

The State of the Blogosphere continues to be strong.

though the curve representing new blog creation finally begins to flatten:

Sifry says this “may be” the result of improved spam-fighting measures: “Spam-, splog- and sping-fighting efforts at Technorati are paying dividends in terms of the reduction of garbage in our indexes, even if it does seem to impact overall growth rates.”

He also buries the lede by skipping too quickly past this newsworthy finding:

About 55% of all blogs are active, which means that they have been updated at least once in the last 3 months.

As usual the report is not lacking for beautiful charts (some of which I have appropriated for this post) but a chart showing the number of active blogs is not among them. Contrary to the bold-faced boast

Currently Tracking More than 57 Million Blogs and Counting.

there are not actually some 60 million active blogs out there. The number is closer to 33 million, which still sounds impressive even if it too is probably a little inflated, and most importantly, has the virtue of being a useful number.

In the (now mysteriously unavailable) comments on the post, one of the early respondents asked that a future report show what the top blogs are actually writing about, perhaps based on the search engine’s top 50 tags. Anyone can check out the most-used Technorati tags for themselves, but I thought it might be interesting to go down the list and figure out what genres or categories define the Top 100 and count them up.

As you can imagine, that’s quite a list. So here’s the color key for the chart and a sample:

Ready for the full list of 100? After the jump:

After the list, check below for more comments. So, what’s in the Technorati Top 100?

Thoughts:

• Blogs about technology and business make up half of the top 10 blogs and nearly a third of all blogs in the list. Is there anything interesting to say about that? It’s not just that the geeks got there first, but that they’re by definition interested in technology, and blogs are, to put it mildly, kind of a big development.
• Niche blogs are big. Considering they’re almost on par with the tightly linked political blogosphere, which also has a capable external support system in none other than the MSM, some niches must be bigger than we might have thought. This category is probably the one most would disagree with; they weren’t all easy calls. Ze Frank could be considered politics, technology or entertainment (maybe in a future edition, I’ll create tags instead of categories). But he’s also a video blogger, which is unique enough to be niche. I welcome all feedback.
• Sifry’s SOTB reports have consistently shown that about 60% of tracked blogs are written in not-English. But this 60% is vastly underrepresented in the list. One possibility is that more blogs have to compete for fewer readers in the non-English blogosphere. But considering that the relationship between links and traffic is nebulous, perhaps there simply fewer cross-links between those blogs. They are spread out over many different languages after all; 33% is Japanese, but the rest is, shall we say, Balkanized. Or, overall blog readership is the same but the readership curve is relatively flat across all blogs, and the not-English blogosphere is impervious to power laws.
• Considering how much money Americans spend per year on entertainment, blogs so themed (including gossip, sports and music) appear to be slightly underrepresented in the top 100. Does this mean that those bloggers are less influential compared to tech and political bloggers? Perhaps. It could be that entertainment journalism has satisfied reader demands better than in hard news and all the niches. Or maybe their readers don’t demand quite as much?
• MySpace is a lousy blogging platform, but it does host a couple of very successful blogs — and one of them is soft core porn. Imagine how much better represented here it would be if MySpace was more like Vox.
• Of course, these are just the top 100, the very tip of the long tail. More detailed patterns would surely emerge as one moved from 100-999 and beyond. Technorati and Dave Sifry could pull those numbers together, and I like his charts showing that blogs rival the MSM once you get to just 51-100 for inbound sources. Here’s hoping it’s in the next report.

As my high school political science teacher, Mr. Marchese, used to (and for all I know, still does) say: Questions, comments, reservations?