Splogs. I noticed some the other day when I was researching Swiss Army Knives. Technorati search results kept emerging for this one site that appeared to be a legitimate blog but was just filled with links to other ostensibly swiss army knife blogs which in turn contained more links to very similar blogs which in turn…..I quickly learned to decipher by their titles the fake blogs and skipped merrily over them as I scrolled. Now multiply this 10,000 times...This week marked at watershed moment in blogging when blogspot and blogger were manipulated by a splogger to generate thousands upon thousands of fake blogs. By interlinking with one another they quickly gamed blog indexing systems to boost their search result ranking. These blogs contained also links to various commerce web sites, home mortgage, poker and tobacco and those free ipod type sites, usually seen as the sites you visit after clicking on an email spam. Gerrymandered results crammed RSS readers and overflowed inboxes. The scope and the sophistication of the attack mark a turning point in the splog war. Icerocket will cease indexing Blogspot until the service fixes the problem. Bloggers were quick to coin new buzzwords to describe the phenom: splogsploision, spamalanche of splogs, splog swell and TheSpunker's entry, "splogasm." The attack preyed upon the very ease and openness of blogging software, generating content that undermines the blogosphere system. No easy solutions are in sight. Further reading: Cnet.com, Google Blog, Chris Pirillo.
UPDATE: Jason Goldman, official Blogger mouthpiece, announced on the BloggerBuzz blog that Blogger will use CAPTCHA (the fun game of scrambling words and text and making you decipher them) to help defeat splog. Incidentally, this step may also help reduce the numbers of those who choose to blog under the influence, a scourge causing over 23,000 deaths per year of the english language.
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