In Sifry's State of the Blogosphere post last year, he described the blogosphere as doubling every 5 months. The graph below shows the number of comment spam blocked from people using the Akismet WorkPress plugin. The y-axis represents the number of spam comments for a given day on a logarithmic scale. The major vertical lines are at 7 day intervals.
A rough measurement of this graph suggests that the number of spam comments per day captured by this system is doubling approximately every 3 weeks.
Now, this isn't anything like comparing like with like, but: My hypothesis is that the number of spam comments is growing faster than the number of posts.
Here are the assumptions that I am making:
- The number of daily posts is proportional to the number of active blogs.
- The number of active blogs is growing no faster than Sifry's cummulative blog growth.
- The pick up of the Akismet service is not growing faster than the number of active blogs.
A good reason to move to WordPress?
Now, ask me again about including comment search in blog search engines...