I just read a post by Mark Cuban that explained it simply as spam in the form of a blog. What is splog?
Spam + Blog = Splog
Clever naming convention I know, but splog is creating an astrericks next to the validity of blogging numbers in the blogsphere as decreasing the quality of blog search engine search results. Mark believes and I agree Google's blogger.com and other free blogging services it make it too easy start a bogus blog or splog. Though I find that offering free blogs is a wonderful thing for the good willed blogger it offers a free tool for nasty sploggers to unleash their garbage. These splogs are clogging the blogsphere and need to be handled in some way. IceRocket hinted at plans to stop indexing free blog offerings to help clean up their search results. I think this is a great idea but unfortunately will hurt the "good willed" blogger thus taking away some of the blogospheres freedom. This lose of freedom is the unfortunate part as these sploggers are really acting as blogosphere terrorists and need to be stopped.
Mark Cuban in closing offered this thought and I am going to take it as a call to arms:
"The intellectual property that is available in the blogosphere is an amazing source of ideas, facts and imagination. Now is the time to do something before the splog overwhelms it and make it difficult to discover new and exciting blogs."
I have a suggestion for Mark and IceRocket and any other blog search engine that will take it and run with it, I think you need a splogger patrol. Ad a link to your search results that allows the "good willed" bloggers of the blogosphere to report any blogs they find to be splogs in nature.
Call it splog reporting or the splog patrol. I recently launched beta for a simple website called SplogReporter.com where "good willed" bloggers can report sploggers. Verification will then be made on which submitted items are truly splogs. So please bookmark the Splog Reporter site and report any splogs you come across. The goal is to create a master directory of splog URLs to have removed from the search engines. So "good willed" bloggers of the blogosphere, this is your call to arms to rid the blogosphere of splogs.
Does anyone have any other suggestions on what can be done to take action against splog without having to eliminate free blog offerings from blog search engine results?
Sphere ItTrackBacks
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Great post. I really like your SplogReporter.com concept and website. Any suggestions on how to reduce/eliminate spam comments to blogs? I am getting links to objectionable sites from people who do not even read my blog but just visit it to post their spam comments.
Of course I could not allow anonymous comments and only allow registered users to post comments.... but that seems like it would hurt many legitimate readers from making an anonymost but relevant post.
I am tired of deleting spam comments all the time, but do not know what to do about it other than maybe stop allowing anonymous comments.
Posted by: JDMBA | Thursday, August 18, 2005 at 02:46 AM
How will this be reported and how will you verify and remove the sites that have unjustly been acused?
Posted by: Splogger | Friday, August 19, 2005 at 07:37 PM
I read your comment on my blog a few days ago and was compelled to find out more about The Splog Reporter. I had to share this information with my readers here: http://www.miriadz.com/blog/?p=77
Posted by: Nancy P Redford | Monday, August 22, 2005 at 03:01 PM
At
http://pascal.vanhecke.info/2005/06/01/hunting-spamblogs/
I suggested a way users/readers could build a public blacklist of spamblogs by tagging them, using services like del.icio.us or furl. Apparently, the idea doesn’t work: there is no immediate reward for denouncing a blog as spamblog as long as blog search engines don’t use it, and for the time being, their presence on del.icio.us even increases their visibility…
I assume the only way to combat spamblogs and related feeds are simple “report as spam” buttons in the Technorati interface itself (comparable with what you have in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc…).
Your suggestions to the blog search engines to have the link to a centralised public blacklist is nice, but I’m afraid none of the services (Technorati, Feedster, Pubsub, Yahoo Myweb2.0,…) will be motivated to share its results though (the ability to effectively filter out spam being a major competitive advantage!).
Posted by: Pascal Van Hecke | Tuesday, August 23, 2005 at 08:40 AM
Great post. The idea of SplogReporter.com concept and website was indeed useful for me. It has been a wonderful experience by learning to useful website article whether they are at blogs or on websites. I have thoroughly enjoyed my experience of learning such useful articles. I would also like to share this Website
http://www.anti-spam-info.com with you, which is certainly a very informative link in terms of increasing your knowledge regarding spams.
Posted by: Kim | Wednesday, October 03, 2007 at 02:00 AM