After reading Mark Cuban’s splog article, “A splog here, a splog there, pretty soon it ads up and we all lose“, I had two reactions.
1st: Note to self: Start making up cool sounding buzz words.
Spam (or Spidering) + Blog = Splog
according to Mark Cuban:
Whats a splog ? A splog is any blog whose creator doesnt add any written value.
2nd: Every “solution” I hear of to stop search engine spam is gameable.
Mark’s Solution is:
“If blogging is supposed to be a personal medium, I dont know why we cant use an email confirmation for blog posts. We do it for comments to keep out comment spam. Why not do it for blog posts ?”
I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt, and grant that he means an “image verification e-mails” for blogger or hosted blogs.
My answer: Bring it on.
If this solution is implemented, either:
1. Our bots will learn to beat the image verification software (most likely) or
2. We’ll pay someone in a 3rd world country $200 per month to verify about 500,000 posts. or
3. We’ll switch entirely to self hosted blogs.
Ideas like splogreporter or some way to “report” splogs are also gameable. If there is a way to assess penalties to competitors, it will lead to:
“Bloggerbowling” - the practice of having robots flag multiple random blogs as splogs regardless of content to degrade the accuracy of the policing service.
6 Responses to “Why Splogs are . . . wait a minute; What’s a “Splog?””
Excellent amendment to bloggerblowling definition:
to include targeted flag attacks on blogs that any “censor” or group finds “objectionable.”
“splog is any blog whose creator doesnt add any written value”
Got to say I know too many human-manual written blogs that apply to this definition…
[…] Apart from the fact that this will lead to just another arms race with black hat bots “flagging multiple random blogs as splogs“, (a counterattack you ‘ll have to ward off with some intelligent reputation algorithms), I think the idea doesn’t work for the same reasons tagging didn’t work: […]
umm , we, 3rd world ppl, already have a captcha cracker, so.. maybe use those monthly $200 and maybe save to buy a brain or somethin and maybe u could figure how to crack it. =)
Just to clarify, my post has nothing to do with the quality of work from 3rd world countries - only the relative cost.
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[…] The SEO Black Hat Blog has coined a new phrase that describes what is about to hit Blogger blogs due to the new flag feature that allows readers to censor blogs they might not agree with: Bloggerbowling. […]