I've been surprised to see several weblogs report that MSN Spaces 27 million blogs with over 7.6 million active bloggers. What I found surprising wasn't the inaccurate data on the number of weblogs or active users that we have. The surprise that these accurate sounding numbers were 'interpreted' from an off hand comment I made in my blog. The source of this information seems to be this post in the Blog Herald entitled MSN Spaces now has 27 million blogs and over 7.6 million active users: Microsoft which states

Microsoft’s blogging service has grown from an estimaited 18 million blogs in October to 27 million blogs and at least 7.6 million active bloggers, according to Dare Obasanjo from Microsoft in a post discussing server issues.

The service still remains in third position amongst blog providers, with Xanga and MySpace both believed to be hosting 40 million blogs each.

(note: calculations based on this line: "I never expected [Spaces] that we'd grow to be three times as big [as Live Journal] and three times as active within a year.")

I've been pretty surprised at the number of blogs I've seen quoting these numbers as facts when they are based on such fuzzy techniques. For the record we don't have 27 million blogs, the number is higher. As for our number of active users, that depends on your definition of active. Using one definition, we are over three times as active as LiveJournal. That's what I meant.