News

David Sifry has posted his latest State of the Blogosphere posting. Here is what he has to say about splogs:

There has been an increase in the overall noise level in the blogosphere, most notably in the number of spam and fake pings that are sent - what I call “spings”. These spam pings are fake or bogus notifications that a blog has been updated; in some cases, these spings can amount to a denial-of-service attack, and can sometimes account for as much as 60% of the total pings Technorati receives. However, we’ve built a sophisticated system that mitigates the spings, and helps to keep spam blogs out of our indexes. Beyond that, about 9% of new blogs are spam or machine generated, or are attempts to create link farms or click fraud. Technorati continues to take an ecosystem approach to solving this problem, working closely with other players like Amazon, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Drupal, Google, MSN, Six Apart, Tucows, Wordpress and Yahoo, and there will be another Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit this spring, building on the success of the previous two summits.

I suspect they are under counting the number of splogs out there. I have a couple of Technorati search feeds and see large amounts of splogs in the continually.

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.

The Guardian has published a splog article today. The article is fairly well written and gets seems to get things right. Again, most of the focus is on Google because they provide an infrastructure to create splogs with Blogger, and a way to earn money with AdSense.

Here is a quote from Jason Goldman, product manager for Blogger:

“Spam blogs cost Google money both on the hosting and infrastructure side for Blogger as well on the AdSense side with spam prevention,” says Goldman. “We take our obligation to our AdSense advertisers seriously and spam, left unchecked, would dilute the confidence our advertisers place in us. By being aggressive on combating spam, we want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

To me this seems like a golden opportunity for Google. If they can figure out how to filter out the splogs, not only will it make AdSense advertisers happy, but it will also make their search results much better. I can’t understand why Google seems to need to be dragged into this fight instead of leading it.

The author of the story, Michael Pollitt, also has additional commentary on his blog.

Found via Spam Chongqing

Another mainstream media outlet, the Washington Post, has an article on splog. It basically pretty standard stuff. They did one small mistake though, they confused comment spam and splogs. Comment spam are not splogs. They are two separate things.

Blogpulse has a nice piece that lists a bunch of sploggers and what they have been up to. It gives a good overview of many of the reasons why sploggers do what they do.

Seems like splogs are starting to get national attention outside of the blogosphere. The Wall Street Journal published an article on splogs today: ‘Splogs’ Roil Web, and Some Blame Google.

The Privacy and Security Law Blog has an article describing legal options for fighting spam. Traditional email spam and blog comment spam is actively sent out to others, allowing some legal actions to be taken. Unfortunately, splog is different from other forms of spam since simply created and waits for search engines crawlers to come to it. Therefore, the legal options are more limited.

Google Blogoscoped did a quick survey of 50 Blogspot blogs and found that 60% of them were splogs.

This is an unacceptable level of splog. I’m hoping the new awareness of splogs and the new reporting facilities will help the situation a little.