A few more high profile bloggers have been complaining about splogs stealing content. Here’s John Battelle
We need to address this….
And Om Malik:
Anyway I think the problem of splogs and scraping can be fixed if Google steps’ up to the plate.
A few more high profile bloggers have been complaining about splogs stealing content. Here’s John Battelle
We need to address this….
And Om Malik:
Anyway I think the problem of splogs and scraping can be fixed if Google steps’ up to the plate.
A new study shows that 75% of pings are generated from splogs. The report analysis pings from weblogs.com over a four week period.
we used our work on splog detection to detect splogs (and hence spings) among the english blogs. Our detection mechanism is close to 90% accurate. As shown in the charts below pings from blogs average around 8K per hour and those from splogs average around 25K.
This is the most comprehensive study of splogs I have seen, and the results are not that surprising to me. This shows that splogs are clearly out of control.
They are also publishing live statistics of blog languages and blogs vs. splogs at http://memeta.umbc.edu/
Found via: The Blog Herald
Mark Cuban has another blog entry dealing with splogs. This time he is responding to a complaint by Steve Rubel that his content is being stolen. Mark’s answer to the problem is to have Blog search engines not index splogs that steal content; only the original entry would be indexed.
This is only half the solution, though. It’s not just blog search engines that find blog content, regular search engines do too. It’s a little harder for regular search engines to filter out duplicate blog entries because they have no knowledge of individual entries, only pages, and its harder for them to know the originator of content if the content is stolen quickly.
While I was gone (because of a crashed hard drive, vacation and business travel, all in a row), Plagiarism Today posted an excellent article.
It pretty much nails all the issues that are relevant in the splog war today, and as often happens in articles about splog, puts Google right in the middle of things.
Google, however, has been a mixed ally in this matter. Though they took token steps to prevent splogs from being created on their service, those steps have proved inadequate and no further plans have been made.
One of the solutions suggested in the article, which makes sense to me, is cutting back on the automation in the blog world.
Perhaps it’s time that we removed some of the automation from the blogging world. Perhaps pings, trackbacks and comments should come with some form of authorization. Even a simple Hashcash setup, a system by which a user has to take a few seconds to complete a simple task before finishing an action, could go a long way to fix the problem.
It can be a hassle for legitimate bloggers, as was seen when Blogger introduced captchas for posting, it probably is time to start taking more serious steps.