Is Microsoft really the largest blog vendor?

by on August 20, 2006

Microsofties take it on face value that they host the most blogs. They even love shoving it in your face. Yesterday someone who works on the Windows Live team was taunting me with “influentials don’t matter, we got to be #1 and we don’t care that there aren’t any influential bloggers using our stuff.”

I was asking them why so few bloggers at BlogHer or Gnomedex use Windows Live Spaces, which is Microsoft’s blog and photo sharing service.

Today I see that George Moore, General Manager of Windows Live, just told a crowd in New Zealand that Windows Live is “now the largest blogging service on the planet.” At least according to Richard MacManus, who I’ve found to accurately report past events, and who is at TechED in New Zealand.

So, that made me itch and when I have an itch I want to scratch it.

Here’s my what’s itching me:

1) Is Windows Live Spaces really used as a blog service very often?
2) Is Microsoft only counting when it’s used as a blog service, or is it counting all uses of Windows Live Spaces?
3) Do other services actually have more “real” blogs? At least percentagewise?

Now, I know that Wordpress.com (currently the service that most of the “in crowd” is recommending) only has about 300,000 blogs. Microsoft is claiming 72 million blogs.

So, over the next few hours I’m gonna do some analysis and see if I can find out how much overcounting there’s going on (there is SOME overcounting, based on my initial looks at http://spaces.live.com and http://www.weblogs.com — I see a whole bunch of things there that don’t look like blogs at all).

First, let’s define what a blog is, at least enough to count for this purpose.

1) Have original content. Spam blogs that are copied off of somewhere else don’t count.
2) Have at least 500 words of new text-based content every month. Things that look like Flickr streams aren’t blogs, sorry.
3) Have at least two posts in at least the past 30 days. If you aren’t posting, you’re not blogging.
4) I don’t care if you have comments, have trackbacks, have blogrolls, or any of that.

Here’s my methodology.
1) I’m going to pull the last hour’s worth of content that was published to each of the services, as reported to weblogs.com as of 3:52 p.m. today (before I post this so no one has time to monkey with the results).
2) I’m going to also visit the home pages of http://spaces.live.com and www.blogger.com and www.wordpress.com and www.typepad.com and report on the percentage of blogs that I find that have been published to their “most recently published” pages are actually blogs.

Add all those percentages together and find an average. Then take that average to the reported number of blogs on each service and see if Microsoft is still #1.

Does that sound like a good methodology? Any changes you’d make?

One thing that’ll be interesting is to compare the percentages today with percentages on, say, Wednesday since I’d expect more “everyday people” to be blogging today, while on Wednesday I’d expect to see more corporate bloggers, which, my thesis is, will skew more away from Windows Live Spaces.

What do you think?

What results do you expect to see from such an exercise?

Disclaimers, Maryam, my wife, uses Windows Live Spaces. I use Wordpress.com. Our book blog, Naked Conversations, is on Typepad. My son used to be on Google Blogger, but he is now on Wordpress.com too.

  • Robert, you ask: "why so few bloggers at BlogHer or Gnomedex use Windows Live Spaces, which is Microsoft’s blog and photo sharing service."

    This reminds me of the rather odd moment a few years ago during the BlogOn conference at Berkeley when a Microsoft speaker (was it you? I've forgotten...) asked for a show of hands of people who used Windows on their laptops. Out of the two hundred or so in the audience, only a tiny number raised their hands. It seems most of the others were using Apple laptops or Linux. What this showed us all, instantly, was that the "digerati" of the blogging world were simply not using the same tools that were used by those in the real world. The tool choices of blog technology developers and blog technology users differ drastically.

    You shouldn't be surprised that BlogHer and Gnomedex aren't representative of the real world since the folk who attend BlogHer and Gnomedex aren't representative of the real world.

    bob wyman
  • Bob: that might be true. But what I'm finding in just the first few minutes of doing my analysis is that most of what are claimed as "blogs" aren't blogs at all. More to come soon. After I dig through the thousands of spam URLs on weblogs.com. Whew!
  • Oh, and lately the audiences have been skewing a lot more toward Windows, which shows they are pulling in more and more of a broad audience rather than just the ultra passionate.

    One last thing. The early adopters predicted the move to Apple (did you see the market share jump last quarter?) as well as the move to Firefox that's underway.
  • Even though I work for microsoft I have to say that when I think of Live Spaces I thinkmore of social networking (ala MySpace) than I do of more formalized blogging. I do know MSN Spaces, now Live Spaces has a huge market in Asia and Latin America but again its really about social networking. Guess it all depends on what your definition of a blog is. Will be interested to see what you come up with.
  • Eric TF Bat
    I think you should include LiveJournal. Yes I know it's the haven of "Which Hobbit Are You" personality tests and terabytes of bad poetry about how Nobody Loves Me, but it's also becoming more serious. I have an LJ, although it's only a temporary thing while I get my own blogging software up and running after a webhost meltdown, and if it can attract a geek like me, it can't be all bad. In particular, the "friends" feature really encourages discovery -- I start with the LJ of someone I know and browse their list of friends finding other people we know in common; gradually I'm building up a list of the online presences of lots of old friends.
  • Eric: I am including LiveJournal, actually. I'm going through the weblogs.com URLs now. I can tell you that in terms of sheer numbers of pings blogspot (er, Google's Blogger) is going to win by a mile but that's before I remove all the spam. Whew is there a lot of spam.

    Michael: actually, so far early early results show that there isn't much of anything on almost ALL of the Windows Live Space URLs sent through.

    Basically I think people are gaming Windows Live Spaces so that they get a cool icon next to their name in MSN Messenger.
  • I think you under estimate the number of regular people (ie. not business bloggers) who only blog during the week. I read a good number of non-professional bloggers (kids, mothers, hobbyists, etc) and see traffic on those blogs go way down during the week-ends. Lots of them fill their weekends with other things and blog during the week at work/school or when bored and tired at night.
    And I really mess up things because I do a lot of my work blogging on the weekend and queue the posts up to show up during the week so I don't lose work time to blogging.
  • Alfred: it'll be interesting to see if that trend holds up if we try this again on Tuesday or something.
  • Robert,

    Why recreate the wheel? I'm sure Tony Conrad of Sphere and David Sifry of Technorati would likely have some pretty good data on the subject.:) They might be willing to share and add value to the conversation.

    For the Record I'm a:
    Windows XP user
    WordPress User (I left a list of Wordpress wish list enhancements in my August 5th post)
  • I think time of day is going to be important too, and any results you get will be scorned by people with analytic minds who realize that probably more of America's teens (or other demographics) are going on WLSpaces in the evening (whether they are actually blogging or not is debatable).

    Taking 1 hour of updating on a Sunday afternoon? Sounds like a ridiculously small sample which potentially gives you hugely wrong results.

    What you need to to do have credible results is do this for a whole week. But for your own sanity I recommend you don't.
  • The "influentials" don't have to post on Live Spaces... within minutes their posts are replicated by dozens of bots on Livejournal-based rip-off sites:-(
  • I know this is not a mesaure or indication at all but i did a simple technorati link search for wordpress.com and spaces.live.com and came up with:

    88,395 links for spaces.live.com
    1,641,806 links for wordpress.com
    1,917,709 links for wordpress.org
  • Jamie
    Im curious. Give me one real reason why me uploading my latest pictures to Flickr and adding a one line comment to each of them is NOT considered a blog? For instance, im using Flickr as a means for people to see how I am progressing in my new job (ironically at the place you just left!) by posting lots of pictures of my new environment etc as well as leaving a brief summary of what each picture is about. People then leave comments on those pictures. I see no difference in my Flickr account to Scobleizer, except the text/picture ratio being reversed.

    Im not arguing or anything, just intruiged as to what we now constitute as a blog.
  • I am interested in how the introduction of Windows Live Writer will play into people using Windows Live Spaces. I have never blogged before but downloading Windows Live Writer has piqued my interest. I'm now seriously considering using Windows Live Spaces to host a blog and photo album. We'll see...

    One downside is that Windows Live Spaces does not allow you to have your own domain name (i.e. mydomain.com) and still leverage the Windows Live Spaces technology.

    Also, I hate typing Windows Live Spaces...stupid marketing monkeys...
  • Patrick: I hate it too. I'm glad Maryam is now the #1 Maryam on Google. Makes it a lot faster to find.
  • Well, this is a very important post. I have had my blog on Spaces for 18 months and it is a very corporate-biased blog but if he who must be obeyed, Robert, says that Spaces is not an officially approved blog to him and his ilk, I should move my blog.

    I await your wonderful judgement.


    Oh, yeah...do you Americans get irony?
  • Not finding much up there? Not suprising. I set one up a long time ago and now it sits doing nothing (last thing I did there was set up an RSS gadget to read my own blog site). Just curious though. Type in the search pictures or vacation (http://spaces.live.com/default.aspx?page=search...) The sites I have seen up there look to mainly be picture dumping grounds as you can store up to 500 imgaes now.
  • Robert:

    I hate to be the bearer of bad news but your test isn't going to tell you anything.

    Approximately half (I don't remember exact %) of all Windows Live Spaces are private and don't send pings to any service (including search engines and our own updates page). These Spaces are hidden from the world in almost every way.

    And they are, in a lot of cases, the most active for obvious reasons.

    Spaces started as a communications tool for your Messenger contacts (friends and family) and that's how a *lot* of people use it today.

    PS. I'd also like to know who "shoved it in your face".
  • Cider: your blog counts as a blog. So does my wife's!

    But, is this a blog? http://isbeliamoorehead.spaces.live.com/

    How about this?
    http://loveableleonamae.spaces.live.com/

    How about this?
    http://lno-nd.spaces.live.com/

    How about this?
    http://rocoko0525.spaces.live.com/

    So, is MSN counting these as blogs?

    If so, the numbers are inflated.
  • Christopher Coulter
    Spaces is not so much a blog service, as an IM profile thing, sorta Yahoo 360'ish, big take from Asia, little more than teenagey profiles, that and half splog. But with 72 million, I am guessing they are also counting the 5 I made in journo-help beta-testing and left to rot for all eternity?

    Even if the obviously dubious Microsoft numbers are accurate, one fact, is undeniable, with 72 million blogs, maybe a handful worth reading...

    there isn’t much of anything on almost ALL of the Windows Live Space URLs sent through.

    Geee, you don't say. Finding anything remotely blog-like in Spaces is a serious effort. Typical Microsoft tho, all churn and corporateish, totally uncool, not making any impact, all covered up with the self-delusional hazy accounting. MSN is a blackhole.
  • Don't be so elitist...
    Isn't "real" in the eye of the Blog beholder?
  • Mike, sorry, I don't tattle on my sources who give me information (and, who, try to shake my assumptions through conversations). It isn't the first time I've heard this discussion, though.

    But isn't that convenient. Call private whatsits "blogs" so there can never be a discussion of who's really biggest.

    Well, sorry. That doesn't fly. If you're going to make a claim of having "blogs" then you gotta put up.

    One of the five definitions of "blogs" I put in front of Bill Gates two years ago as part of a thinkweek paper was that they must ping a ping server so that they'd be discoverable. So, private Web spaces are NOT blogs in my book.
  • >>Don't be so elitist.

    No. It's not. Blogging is a well-known gesture. Here's the five things that blogging is:

    1) Easy to do. Type in a box and hit publish.
    2) Discoverable. THrough search engines. IE, public.
    3) Social. I can track when you link to me from another domain, either through search engines, through trackbacks, or through my referer logs.
    4) Permalinkable. I can send you a link directly to a post.
    5) Syndicatable. I can use a news aggregator to read your content, which lets me read a lot more blogs.

    Don't have one of those five things? You aren't a blog. Period. Not up for discussion.

    Another definition? Blogging got its name from Pyra's Blogger. It has all five of these things (although private "blogs" aren't blogs in the strictest definition since they wouldn't be discoverable by Google or Live.com).
  • Christopher Coulter
    PS - Apart from the b0rg, I see you finally, aren't buying the Dare and Torres "but-but-but-most-are-private-so-we-can-stick-in-any-number-we-want" excuse.

    But no one would care if MSN wasn't flinging their 72 million penis around, arrogantly claiming the biggest in town.
  • Scoble: if your definition of a blog doesn't include people who don't want to be found, then *no one* at Microsoft could claim that Windows Live Spaces is the largest blogging service.

    But that's a pretty silly definition for someone who claims to get trends :)
  • Mike: make up a new name for what private spaces are, then. They aren't blogs. Maybe they are "plogs." For "private blogs."
  • Amazon has plogs - I thought of that too ;) I will surely let Marketing and PR know that you take issue with this. I could call it whatever I want and that wouldn't change anything. I'm just 1/70,000.

    We've always said Spaces is more than blogging alone, so I've personally never been a fan of calling it a blogging service. But Marketing isn't my job.
  • Anonymous
    I've always hated Microsoft for creating MSN Spaces. In a nutshell, they did essentially nothing to innovate when they created MSN Spaces.

    The only reason people uses MSN Spaces is because it was pushed to them as part of MSN Messenger. People on my contact list barely write anything and they simply use it as an avenue for posting pictures, which I definitely don't consider blogging.

    Microsoft is lucky to have such a large userbase to push these services to. Otherwise they'd be dead in the water. They are definitely not one to brag about blogging.
  • John
    I find your exclusion of "things that look like Flickr streams" to be artificially limiting. These are some of my favorites, and prompt as much discussion as any. The literalists who dominate software should recognize there's a whole non-verbal universe, and I'm waiting for the day the rest of you discover near-full HTML in your blogs. Until then, LiveJournal's fine with me. Count us. Or don't. Write us off as non-serious journals. Doesn't matter to me.
  • Looks like MS is counting all spaces as a blog. (See Windows Live Stats section at http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/windows_li...)

    I agree those spaces that you linked to in your comments that said "There are no entries in this blog." Should not be counted as blogs. I bet the majority of their 72 M "blogs" have this comment in them.
  • Preston
    All I have to say is, 72 million is a really high number and sounds awfully suspicious. Microsoft is desperate to have SOME slice of the web and, I'm sure, will do anything to convince themselves and others that they've succeeded.
  • We reported on the distribution of blogs in the blogpulse dataset used for the 3rd Annual Workshop on Weblogging Ecosystem: Aggregation, Analysis and Dynamics at WWW 2006.

    See http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/299/Char... for a paper with the data.

    Our approach to differentiating echt blogs from splogs and from random feeds was to build a training set and then use it to train an SVM model. the accuracy for the blog/non-blog decision was about 98% and for the blog/splog decision was about 88%.

    I think your 500 words and two posts a month constraint is quite reasonable. Generous, even.
  • Microsoft Sux
    Microsoft Sux!! Deleting files at network drive do not go to recycle bin. Stupid Bug.
  • I'll leave my thoughts on this for a post, but I can tell you now that Spaces will still come out on top by your own criteria, Blogger is the only service that might come close (in terms of numbers), and yet the ratio of real blogs to splogs there is far, far worse than Spaces.
  • fonstuinstra
    According to the latest figures I have for the Chinese market MSN Spaces is the no.2, holding 15 percent of the market. That is decent, but not #1.
    http://www.chinaherald.net/2006/07/blogs-market...
  • Bob
    The video of George's keynote is up... http://www.microsoft.com/nz/events/teched/keyno...
  • Private blogs, whatever you want to call them, are still indexed by many search engines, just not Google. I know, because I had one at Diary-X for years, and when the server went bye-bye I got my archives from Yahoo caches. Believe me, I didn't choose Diary-X for the privacy; I've always wondered about the brainpower of people who take the most powerful communication tool in the world and mark it "Don't look over here!"

    Perhaps I'm too cynical, but is it not possible that Microsoft has simply created a Space for every registered MSN Messenger user? This would account for the inflated numbers, and a quick email to someone at Microsoft should give you your answer.

    I agree with most of your criteria, except I do believe that original images, whether photographs or artwork, should count as a blog post. There's a reason it's called multimedia.
  • The European blogosphere
    http://www.eu.socialtext.net/loicwiki/index.cgi...

    China's New Obsession with Blogs and How Companies Can Benefit
    "The total number of blogs in China will grow over 200% from 37 million in 2005 to nearly 120 million by the end of 2006."
    http://china.seekingalpha.com/article/13336
  • Perhaps the difference between this dialog and the one you would have had a few months ago has to do with the facts you are searching for. Biggest doesn't mean anything if you're not the best for the most people.
  • I hope microsoft get 'class actioned' fined by the eu etc for this monopoly they just admitted - i have privacy concerns about yahoo and microsoft especially if i was in china.
  • David Taylor
    Robert,

    500 words per month!!!

    Even if you just blog 50 words per month...You are still bloging. I think the methadology should be that you blog once per month and 50 words.

    Not everyone has the time you do to blog robert.

    If the average population wrote 500 words per month there would be low productivity :-)
  • PJ
    Nothing comes close to WordPress.

    You've got the source, the themes, the plugins, the support, etc. And it's free. I heart WordPress.
  • Robert,

    I agree completely with your definition of a blog.

    I also completely disagree that it is THE definition of a blog. Any more than there is A definition of religion.

    Part of your book's major message is that its the conversation. If you and I were in a debate, one might mistake our verbal communication as the only vehicle of the debate.

    But anyone who watched Al Gore and George Bush would know that presentation is a big part of it.

    Deaf people can also debate and not say a single word.

    So if blogging is a naked conversation, I'd say it surely can be a stream of pictures. Neither you nor I choose to communicate that way. But others might and it weakens the blogging community to undermine those other forms of communications.
  • hah people defending msn spaces like they own it or something. its quite funny actualy.
    seriously dudes, msn spaces as a blogging platform sucks ass, its cluttered, ugly, and slow.
    and to claim the spaces is the largest blogging platform that is, is just rediculous.
  • In my opinion Scoble, I believe your definition of blogging is too narrow. A blog is a short web log containing text, photos and/or links to other sites. The term is too broad to narrow down like you have done. However, I will be interested in reading your results and data analysis.

    Wikipedia's Definition of Blogging (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blogging)

    Advisor-Norris
  • Interesting, very interesting. At Wordcamp a few weeks ago this very subject came up. "What is a blog" The best we came up with was:
    A Sequential series of posts that try to draw you to conversation through words, pictures, video, and *cast


    I see how you rate it as being generous. But I could also see a blog having at least a 50 word post once a month being closer to the truth for a lot of blogs. I'd say 500 words and 2 posts a usuable blog.

    Interesting back and forth and as you can guess I'd vote for Wordpress, but I'd guess either Blogger or MySpace as the top blogging sites.
  • Spaces missing influentals & business? Could be that some of the influentals have read the Terms of Use which isn't good for anyone who wants to protect their intellectual property.

    1. There currently is not a limitation to how long you grant rights to the Public for use of your content.

    2. There currently is not a limitation to how or where the Public can sub-licence your content in any medium in any edited form. By posting your content you grant the public this right.
  • Sue
    I don't know if Windows Live is the largest, but I do know when they made the switch over to Live, they screwed so much up. MSN Spaces is a nightmare to deal with now. Many of us have begun our blogs at Blogger and Wordpress. Trying to make the move, but still keeping the MSN space open until we train people to go to the new space. So many Windows Live users have begun the move.

    I'm interested in hearing your results.
    Sue
  • Doug Kirschman
    I just recently started using MS spaces. They have a bata tool called Windows Live Writer that is actually pretty decent.

    I can tell you that I did a lot of surfing on spaces, and most of what I saw were not blogs in the strictest sense. I can say that with 70+ million sites, even if five percent are blogs, that's still 3.5 million.

    Another interesting thing to note is that this is perhaps Microsoft's only web project that hasn't totally failed. The interface is pretty easy, the technology is pretty decent and now, with Live Writer, one can blog if they wish.

    All you anti-MS people need to take some pills. You can hurt yourself that way.
  • Sue
    Hey baby, I'm not anti-MSN. Since they switched to Live, everything has slowed to a snail pace when trying to load pages or move around and they now have made a pain for people outside of MSN to leave a comment. I'm starting to remove things like the weather module to see if my page will load faster.

    Sue : )
  • Nathan
    I think MSN Spaces goes after a completely different type of blogger than wordpress or blogspot. The MSN Spaces blogger is typically into sharing their own personal experiences with there friends and family, where I think the wordpress (and blogspot to a lesser extent) are used more by people that have something to say to the world (e.g. scoble, seth godin, gladwell, search engine watch... or the influencers). In that sense, I think spaces completes with flickr and Yahoo 360, much more than they compete with wordpress (or blogspot).
  • Link to Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger » Is Microsoft really the largest blog vendor?
  • Im not arguing or anything, just intruiged as to what we now constitute as a blog.
  • Can Bulut
    Thank you
  • I don't agree with you ..Sorry.I like microsoft.
  • Communications
    In a rapidly moving news environment, FDF operates a 24/7 press office and provides communications support to members FDF is the voice of the UK food and drink manufacturing industry. We work hard to promote the interests of the UK's most important manufacturing sector.
  • Thanks for the content..... :)
  • Hi, everyone. I am new to blogs and wants some advice on how to use the technology and RSS feeds for my site more effectively. I have a gallery: http://www.artbank.ch/Gallery/gallery.html


    and want to add the most tech advanced blog on this page. What is the best way to do it? Shall I do it on the same page or add another?

    Cheers
  • nice article and its really true.
  • Im not arguing or anything, just intruiged as to what we now constitute as a blog.
blog comments powered by Disqus