Doc Seals issues a call to arms against splogs, the latest form of exploitation of the blogs and the Live Web by spammers.
I suggest that everybody in the search engine business, including all the Static Web and Live Web companies I listed above, pool their knowledge and expertise, and beat a cancer that (in my humble but considered opinion) threatens the whole Live Web, including blogging in particular and frequently updated free content in general.
Across the search engine marketplace, there is an enormous amount of duplicated effort fighting splogs and other forms of blog spam. There is also an open source solution to this: share the know-how. Even the data (perhaps through a public list of offenders).
Prior to the battle cry, there is a succint explanation of the latest blog spam scam for the unitiated:
Blog spammers make money through what Mark Cuban calls "splogs": any blog whose creator doesn’t add any written value. Here’s one that showed up in my aggregator this morning, probably because it included a link to this blog, my name, or both. It was clearly created, and is kept up to date, by automatic processes of some kind. That one happens to be a Blogspot blog. There are others coming out of hosting services using Moveable Type or Wordpress. Surely many more come from other sources as well. What matters is that they are being created by the many thousands, every day. At the top of the splog in the last paragraph are four "Ads by Goooooogle". That phrase links to Google’s AdSense service, via a URL that includes the four ads below it, all placed by AdSense on the splog.
And the driving force, the fuel for this is advertising:
Now, for the advertisers, does this splog not add value? If somebody clicks through to any of those four advertisers, or to AdSense, is their per-click expense well spent? Whether or not the answer to that is "yes" for everybody else, it’s certainly "yes" for the splogger who gets paid for the click. And that’s exactly how sploggers will defend their business model.
The Problem is the corrupting influence of Big Ad Money itself.
I guess some might think that this is taking the dislike of advertising too far. But I haven’t seen Doc proposing to eliminate advertising, simply identifying where the money for blog spammers is. As I say to whomever will listen, there are two roads that marketing can take – one is louder, bigger, more ‘creative’ and even more interruptive to capture the ever elusive attention of its ‘target audience’. This road ultimately leads to the ’scum of the internet’ – adware, spyware and blog spam to measure and exploit every flick of our eyeballs. The other is engagement, dare I say, a conversation and leads…God knows where. One think I am sure of – you’ll be tripping over blogs along the way.
