ON BLOG SPAM AND POSSIBLE MEASURES

UNCLE

Wired News has a good article titled "Spam + Blogs= Trouble" that illustrates how blogging for many folks like yours truly is some days almost more trouble than it's worth. 

And it's because of something called Splogs, a phenomenon I touched on over a year ago.  As the Wired piece explains:

"Like email spam, splogs use the most wonderful features of networked communication – its flexibility, easy access, and low cost – in the service of sleazy get-rich-quick schemes.

But whereas email spammers try to induce recipients to buy products, sploggers and other Web spammers make most of their money by getting viewers to click on ads that run adjacent to their nonsensical text. Web page owners – the spammer, in this case – get paid by the advertiser every time someone clicks on an ad."

As the article continues:

"Just as the proliferation of email spam constantly threatens to inundate email providers, the explosion of blog spam is a besetting problem for the blog industry. Like most people who poke around the blogosphere, I had occasionally encountered splogs before."

The piece  has some eye-opening numbers:

• "Some 56 percent of active English-language blogs are spam, according to a study released in May by Tim Finin, a researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County..."

• "A recent survey by Mitesh Vasa, a Virginia-based software engineer and splog researcher, found that in December 2005, Blogger was hosting more than 100,000 sploggers..."

• " ...the legitimate blogosphere generates about 300,000 posts a day, but the splogosphere emits 900,000..."

• "More than 10 million of the 12.9 million profiles on Blogger (owned by Google) surveyed by splog researcher Vasa in June were inactive, either because the bloggers had stopped blogging or because they never got started..."

The last one begs the question of what are similar numbers at the other major blog hosting sites like Six Apart's Typepad, on which this blog is based, along with MSN Spaces, Xanga and others.

The whole article is worth reading in it's entirety, as it offers insight on what's being tried to address the problem, both now and in the future.

But in the mean time, I know I'm spending increasing amount of time every day deleting spam links both in the Comment and Trackback sections of this blog.

And it's taking a toll.

It's putting me right on the edge of turning off one if not both features. 

It'll be a shame since it takes away much of the interaction and discussion that I'm blogging for in the first place.

As a trial, I'm turning on the feature that holds both comments and  trackbacks for approval.

Unfortunately it introduces a delay for regular readers of this blog.  For that I apologize, but ask your patience.

We'll see if that makes things a little easier on the splog front. 

Any thoughts, suggestions are appreciated as always.

Comments

[candice]

You might as well turn off trackback if you've got other means of tracking incoming links. Fred Wilson mentioned doing this on A VC a while back.

Moderating comments I found is more trouble than it's worth, because then you still have to go delete stuff. The spam is just scripts, and the scripts don't care whether they see results or not to a post.

[Al From Chicago]

Michael --

I think that's one of the reasons that our new buzztracker service is useful -- we essentially generate topic pages (130 plus growing to 1000 by Thanksgiving) by looking at most blogged stories *only considering handpicked blogs at head of the tail* -- in otherwords - we have guaranteed no garbage in our results. We actually met at PC Forum and I had told you I would be launching this -- took me till labor day for soft launch but we got it done. Take a look and let me know what you think -- Fred commented on it here: http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2006/08/buzztracker.html . Let me know if you want to talk more about it --

--Alan

[Mike Hirshland]

Michael--try Akismet, offered by Automattic.