Splogsplosion? Not according to Dave Sifry of Technorati

With all of our talk about Google's Splogsplosion it's interesting to see some comments from Technorati's Dave Sifry, who clearly sees more blogs than many of us. According to him it's not as bad as it seems. Here's a section from his latest state of the blogosphere report.

In the last couple of days, there's been a lot of talk about a set of spam blogs that have been set up to do keyword stuffing using a lot of popular phrases, including many popular bloggers' names. Lots of people have discussed this, including Tim Bray, Dave Winer, Ed Cone, Robert Scoble, Chris Pirillo, Jeff Jarvis, and others. In order to adequately analyze this, I updated the chart to include the blog data we've been tracking all the way up to yesterday, October 16, 2005.

In the past 2 weeks, there were 805,000 new weblogs created. In addition, Technorati tracked an additional 39,000 new fake and spam weblogs, which means that about 4.6% of the total weblogs tracked were fake or spam.

One of the remarkable things that comes out of looking at the data is that while spam and fake blogs are a problem, they are not an overwhelming problem - In fact, we've experienced much worse spam attacks in the past. The key difference in the spam attack over the weekend is that the attackers' posts included many popular search terms including popular bloggers' names - which is a common ego search on engines like Technorati. This made this particular attack much more visible to a number of high profile bloggers than attacks in the past.

So is 4.6% an overwhelming amount of spam blogs? Are those of us here seeing more because of the keyword playgrounds we frequent, or is this nothing more than bunch or girly-man A-list bloggers getting their panties in a bunch because someone creates spam associated with their name?