News

Technorati is hosting the Second Web Spam Summit at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California next week. (The announcement doesn’t specify the day the event will be occuring.)

They plan on discussing “comment spam, link spam, TrackBack spam, tag spam, and fake weblogs”. I guess “fake weblogs” is where splogs fit it. I’m not sure I like the term “fake weblog”, it somehow doesn’t convey the whole idea for me. Fake weblog sound more like a weblog written by a fictional character.

I hope they make some progress at this summit this summit. The list of attendees so far is: Ask Jeeves, Feedster, Google, Microsoft, Six Apart, Tucows, WordPress, and Yahoo! It sounds like they have enough of the right people there to do some damage. I would like to see IceRocket, Bloglines and Microsoft (MSN) there as well.

Found via: Somewhat Frank

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.

A new splog fighting website AntiSplog.net, has been launched.

According to the site

AntiSplog is a Spam blogs database which is based on an automated testing process. AntiSplog try to analyze blog content and detect different type of blogs spams. The information are recorded in database to be accessible online via a simple interface actually, that we’ll extend later with more functionalities.

You can submit the URL of a blog, and it determines whether or not it is slog. This is a promising new addition to the splog fighting toolkit.

The Spam Chongqing Blog is reporting that he is not seeing much splog using Blogger’s “next” button. He saw only one clear splog and two questionable blogs.

I did my own quick test of 50 clicks on the “next” button and found only one questionable blog. That’s somewhere around 2-4% splogs. That’s much better than what Google Blogoscoped has reporting recently.

Wow, it looks like Blogger is really managing to clear out the splogs quickly. This is a very hopeful sign.

Any domain which has inaccurate or fake data can be reported to the InterNIC Whois Data Problem Report System.
Sploggers often use fake information in their domain registration in order to be anonymous.
Reporting violations will put them under investigation by their registrars and help expose them.

Thanks to Matt Cutts for writing about this.

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.

Spam Chonging has a new post that has some good advice for new spam fighters. I have taken some of this advice and applied it to my site.

Thanks Joe!

Spam Chonging is a blog dedicating “to retaliate against spammers of wikis and blogs”. They have been talking about splogs a lot recently.

James Kew is reporting success in using Blogger’s “Flag” button.

This is a promising sign.

Bob Wyman, CTO and co-founder of PubSub.com, blog search engine, has posted a blog entry talking a little about his company’s efforts to fight splog.

He says:

I strongly believe that it is in the best interest of our users to filter this stuff out. It should also be noted that we generally will not identify the methods that we use to find these things and we won’t announce (except on rare occasions like this one) which feeds we’re filtering out. If we discuss our identification methods, people will simply learn how to work around those methods. If we identify which feeds we’re eliminating, we’ll be revealing valuable information about our methods.