Welcome to the Splogosphere: 75% of new pings are spings (splogs)
In the blogosphere, pings are notifications sent by updated blogs to PingServers. A major issue recently has been unjustified pings, also known as Spings, sent by Splogs. Splogs have been discussed a lot recently …
Context & Ripple Effects
Spam blogs have been an open wound in the blogging world since at least October 2005, when The RSS Blog surveyed the state of the splogosphere and found fake blogs polluting search and ping infrastructure. Two days before this report, ClickZ's Pocket Guide to the 2005 Blogosphere treated blog growth as the year's defining story — this measurement cuts against that optimism.
The new figure is stark: three of every four pings hitting PingServers are spings from splogs rather than genuine update notifications. That reframes splogs from a content-quality nuisance into a load problem for the notification layer itself, since discovery tools built on pings must now filter out three-quarters of their incoming signal.
First-order effects
- PingServer operators face immediate infrastructure strain and filtering work: with 75% of new pings unjustified, any service ranking or surfacing recently updated blogs is mostly processing spam.
Second-order effects
- Blog search engines and aggregation services that rely on pings lose latency and accuracy advantages, pushing them toward verification or whitelist mechanisms that raise barriers for legitimate small publishers.
Third-order effects
- If splog generation keeps pace with blog growth, ping-based discovery degrades as a trust signal, shifting authority toward curated directories and identity-verified publishing — the same spam-vs-legitimacy arms race already visible across web platforms.
The trend: Blog infrastructure is entering an arms race where automated spam (splogs, spings) forces notification and search services to trade openness for verification.