Spam Blog
October 19th 2005 Posted at Musings
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A lot has been written about the sudden torrent of spam blogs (splogs), I think the problem is not nearly so bad as some people make it out to be. First off any free hosting service is going to serve as a vector for this sort of content. Everyone seems to blame Google and Blogspot which hardly seems appropriate. Everyone also apparently has a very short memory. This is has been a problem before and was solved before.
Remember free web hosting services? Remember Geocities, Fortune City etc? For a while there was a proliferation of search engine spam using free hosting services. As such people thought search engines would become useless because of all the spam from the free hosting services . Yet this particular spam problem was solved simply by devaluing the value of content hosted on free web servers.
Since the free hosting service vector is easily identiifable, you can quickly isolate the critter from the rest of the blogosphere. Blogspot itself can offer a number of quality standards by which spam blogs can be isolated. I would use the users profile as the a quality indicator. A fully complete profile with interests and full address iis a clear indicator of potential quality. Ultimately you could devalue blogs using free hosting services. While this certainly piss off those bloggers that are using blogspot but it is a solution.
The reason of course that blogspot is a vector for splogs is because it’s relatively easy to set up the account and to begin splogging. By raising the cost of acquiring the splog you can minimize the amount of splogging. For example you could value the paid hosting services such as Typepad or installations of software such as MT.
I think it’s a matter of fine tuning blog search really. I also don’t think it the end of the world as this post makes it sound. Of course people constantly over-react especially in the blogsphere. It’s an easily solved problem guys. Solvable on two fronts – the cost of the blog and relative importance of the blog in the blogosphere.
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