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August 25, 2005
The War on Splogging: Fighting an Online Cancer
Doc Searls has an excellent post this morning about the dire need for search engine companies to engage in a war on splogging. Splogging is a term coined by Mark Cuban to describe blogs with no added value, existing solely to trick people into visiting and exposing them to advertising. Splogs are often encountered in two ways: by searching for a key word on a search engine, or receiving it as a fradulent hit through your RSS aggregator. More often than not, they're automated, linking to countless blogs and other websites, using keywords selected solely to attract more eyeballs and click-throughs for their advertising. And automation means that splogs are being created at a dizzying pace, to the point that when you do a search for almost any term, you're bound to get a bunch of hits that are nothing but money-hungry splogs.
With each passing day, I'm seeing more of both, and frankly, it's become maddening. Fortunately, Doc was able to put some real thought into just how bad this has gotten, and how it's an existential threat to the Web. His post offers a simple, but powerful way of combatting splogging: an industry-wide open source taskforce in which search engine companies pool their resources to fight the splogging scourge.
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)....Open-sourcing expertise is the right thing to do for the free marketplace we call the Net, as well as for all the responsible leaders there. Especially when we're fighting a cancer as malignant as this one.
I'm really glad Doc, Cuban and other big-time bloggers are addressing splogging. It's more than a nuisance. It's the kudzu of our time. -andy
Posted by acarvin at August 25, 2005 9:15 AM
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