[via Social Synergy Weblog]
[bliki]
Steve Rubel has a great little article on micropersuasion about how previewing an upcoming Wired magazine piece about how “sploggers“, blogs created to tap into contextualized ad services like Google AdSense, are ruining the blogosphere. Steve writes:
The [wired magazine] article, written by Charles C. Mann, exposes the underworld of link farms and junk blogs that are designed to generate traffic and advertising clicks. (I will add a link once the article is up.) The piece includes some really interesting points:
* Some 56 percent of active English-language blogs are spam, according to researchers at the University of Maryland
* A survey by Mitesh Vasa in December 2005 found that Blogger.com was hosting more than 100,000 sploggers
* One splogger interviewed by Wired (I’m not going to dignify him with a mention) made over $70,000 in just three months from his network of splogs
I know that in my own experience, I have found spammers copying my blog posts and then post them to their blogs under their own name. This is not a problem unique to blogs, actually. It’s also a problem in wikis, message boards, and basically almost every type of participatory online system.
The MeatBall Wiki community may have one possible route to a solution for wiki spam in SoftSecurity. SoftSecurity is proven to work, but requires an engaged community to make it work.
Could a collective approach also work with blog spam, and “splogs”?
Steve Rubel suggests that the ad companies, like Yahoo and Google, should screen people better, to block out potential spammers. I think he is on to something. Perhaps interested people might be able to go even a step further, and work together to create a database of known spam blogs? Those same people could very well put pressure on Google and Yahoo, and blog hosts, to stamp out spam blogs.
The real question here is: How do you keep the barrier to entry low for things like blogging and joining ad networks, yet simultaneously keep the barrier to abuse high?
Graffiti on a wall can be beautiful or ugly. Most graffiti artists make no income from their works. Whether they pollute the physical space depends on the work they create. Simple tags on the windows of public subway trains are generally ugly although are like a primitve back channel of communication for the writers. “I was here” is the main message, like dogs pissing.
Sploggers on the other hand produce sites which often make little sense, with the intent on generating links while pitching the pin-ball machine of adSense to the left and right to tip the odds of winning. Their creators want to earn money, the profit motive ruling. They are different from graffiti artists in their speed of reaction (the medium) and like Steve Rubel has observed, ripping content from the sites of people that have invested their attention and authenticity. At the same time their final result can not be taken to be a serious insult in that they merely reproduce and add little meaningful commentary aside from commercially directed messages to feel insulted by or to respond to on any higher level of meaning. The question is whether splogs represent a violation of attention/identity rights? Noone died, but an identity was abused/reused. What is the appropriate reaction to them?
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