For a long time, ping servers could be stood up as a single box running on a fast business DSL connection.

Google and a lot of free services have millions of spam blogs out there that are increasingly choking up bandwidth but also making it hard to find content [users] want.

NewsGator has a big footprint in aggregating for the enterprise. [At this point], it's like selling e-mail without spam filtering. Enterprise is holding it at arm's length and will continue to do so until there's some improvement in quality.

We think parts [of the blogosphere] will break because of load and growth.

[Privacy guardians take note: Authentication doesn't mean personally identifiable information.] We've become very keen on making sure we take pains to differentiate that identity is one thing, but authentication and credentials is another, ... We can provide identity tools. They can be anonymous. ? There's no privacy issue involved. Identity is a way to tell A from B, just to tell that A is not B.

They're fairly sophisticated, template-driven to provide a specified blog with appropriate posts and pages, a thousand at a time, ... But inevitably they leave some kind of structure, some kind of signature behind, that you can say, 'Ah ha, that has the fingerprint of tools out there that create these blogs.'

Last Thursday weblogs.com processed just under 2 million (1.96M) pings for the day. When we started talking with Dave [Winer, owner and founder of Weblogs.com], a couple months back, the ping totals were barely half of that, and the load even then on the servers made pinging Weblogs a chancy proposition during peak posting times.

There's a lot of hype regarding how much the blogosphere has grown, and it has, and a lot of it is legitimate blogs with real content. But there's a scandal under the surface.

On the back side, we see pings from Blogger.com, and an enormous number are splogger pings. Google obviously has a filtering mechanism in its own perimeter. They use search and textual analysis tools, quickly and fairly accurately, I'd say. You'd likely find two or three out of 50 that are spam blogs.