MSN Spaces now has 27m Blogs

Duncan Riley at Blog Herald estimates that Spaces now commands 27 million blogs. He made this estimate from a post by Microsoft man, Dare Obasanjo. “When we first shipped MSN Spaces last year, I assumed that we’d be lucky if we became as big as LiveJournal, I never expected that we’d grow to be three times as big and three times as active within a year.”

However, only 7.6m blogs are active. I believe an active blog is one that has been posted on within the last month. Any refinements on that?

Dare also makes an interesting point for anyone with a Web startup: “If you are a startup, don’t waste your time and money worrying about what happens when you have millions of users. Premature optimization is the root of all evil and in certain cases will lead you to being more conservative than you should be when designing features. Remember, even the big guys deal with scalability issues.”