Business | Technology
Weblogs haunted by the son of spam
It has been called "son of spam", the next big thing to hate, the problem with Web 2.0. The much-hyped world of weblogs is starting to get worried about its very own spam problem called, predictably enough, splogging.
- Financial Times
- Published: 00:00 November 4, 2006
It has been called "son of spam", the next big thing to hate, the problem with Web 2.0. The much-hyped world of weblogs is starting to get worried about its very own spam problem called, predictably enough, splogging.
Hosted on websites such as MySpace, blogs offer a way for users to keep in touch with each other and share and watch music and videos.
A splog, on the other hand, is blog-style site consisting of nonsense words, cribbed content or a mixture of both.
One way in which splog owners make money is through conventional advertisements, which are often automatically included in the margins of every blog page.
These pay the blog owner every time visitors click on them. Splogs, too, often contain a greater proportion of links to other pages than normal blogs, which boosts their relative position on search engines such as Google.
"The first thing to recognise is that every healthy ecosystem has its parasites," says David Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, a search engine that indexes blogs.
The growth of splogs, he says, mirrors that of blogging. When the former was a niche pursuit, there were few or no splogs; now they are too numerous to count.
If splogs were simply created to promote products and services, they would not be a big problem.
However, they are often generated automatically, so that tens of thousands can be produced by a single person. The content is usually either created by software or "scraped" or copied from existing sources. It ranges from gibberish to perfectly sensible entries duplicated from other sites.
Sifry reckons that, by some measures, about 90 per cent of new blogs are splogs. Google, which owns Blogger, one of best-known sites on which blogs (and splogs) can be created, agrees they are a nuisance.
Blogger and other services like it use tools to ensure the blog has been entered by a human rather than an automated system. But like the fight against e-mail spam, it is a constant war of attrition in which the spammers are often one step ahead.
More from Technology
More from Business
Business Editor's choice
-
DFSA chief to step down in September
Executive has been at post since 2008
-
Geepas idea blossomed in Dubai
The journey led from a small shop in Bahrain to a $1.27b company in the UAE
