According to Richard MacManus, Windows Live General Manager George Moore told an audience at Microsoft's TechEd 2006 conference in New Zealand yesterday that Windows Live Spaces (formerly MSN Spaces) is "now the largest blogging service on the planet," and his assertion is causing a bit of a stir. Microsoft says there are 72 million Spaces in existence, but former Microsoftie Robert Scoble says maybe that's so, but are they really all blogs? Scoble says no, and outlines his idea of what makes and doesn't make blog. "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."

That seems pretty reasonable to me, but many of the commenters disagree. But Scoble is soldiering on, setting out to collect some data on what Microsoft is counting as a blog. His first sample isn't very promising, with only 2% of the recently-updated "blogs" meeting his criteria. Microsoft's Mike Torres piped up on the original post to tell Scoble his methodology is flawed, because over half of all Spaces are private, to which Scoble replies that a private blog isn't a blog at all. So, who's full of what, here? Is Microsoft blowing up its numbers to inflate its ad rates (or something else?), or is it Scoble whose ego is out of control and who's picking on the low-hanging fruit?