As you can see from my tapping feet, that I am agitated. Why? This is not a laughing matter. Not another boggywoggy satire on boogle, froogle, google, toogle, woogle.Why?
Yesterday, I was on Bayosphere, Dan Gilmor's Blog and I saw the topic on spam blogs flooding blogspot. I went on to read the post on the problem written by prominent blogger Chris Pirillo and also read another post on the same issue written by Rich Miller and I have already complained to Google to deal with the dangers of sploggers before they destroy blogspot.
The fact that robots could create spam blogs on Blogger is dangerous.
I have decided to blog the posts for your information. Please, read and comment.
Google: Kill Blogspot Already!!!
C:\PIRILLO.EXE
@ 01:28AM (PDT) on October 16, 2005
In the past few days, I've been inundated with an enormous amount of subscribed search spam for designated keywords. To the tune of hundreds, if not THOUSANDS, of bunk entries. Who knew "lockergnome" and "pirillo" would be THAT popular?! Still, I can't help but think that others are having the same headaches - and 99% of the crap coming in is directly from a single domain: blogspot.com.
Google, it may have been a smart acquisition in the beginning, but y'all need to clean house in a big way. You're the tallest nail, and you're really getting pounded - and now others, who aren't even using your service, are getting pounded. Blogspot has become nothing but a crapfarm, and your brand is going to go down with it. If your motto truly is to do no evil, then you need to start putting some resources behind an effort to curb this train wreck.
I don't know what's (specifically) making it so insanely easy for these spammers to get signed into your system, but you need to change that - ASAP. Forget about developing another Web-based aggregator for now (sorry, Shellen - Blogspot needs more help at this point). I'd love to ban / filter anything and everything that comes from blogspot.com, but the problem is that I have quite a few friends on that service who are sitting in the 1% "legitimate" minority.
Suggestion, Google? As bold as this might sound, you should institute an authentication system - a captcha of sorts - for every single post that gets sent through your Blogger service. This means that there's no more easy rides for the idiots out there who are killing your baby and the blogosphere. The user logs in, enters their post, then has to jump through a captcha hoop - much like commenters have to do on Blogger.com these days. It's a simple suggestion, and one that you really, really, really, REALLY oughta consider. You were willing to go the ref="nofollow" route, why stop there?
Copy the captcha to the publishing system, Google - let's just see what happens? Please, for the love of all that is holy, STOP MAKING IT SO INCREDIBLY EASY FOR THE SPAMMERS TO EXPLOIT. If you don't want to try anymore, then just get rid of Blogger altogether.
In other words: kill IT before they kill YOU
Google Draws Fire Over Blogspot Spam Blogs Dogfood
The explosion of spam blogs on Google's Blogspot hosting service is drawing a chorus of condemnation from prominent bloggers, and has led at least one blog search service to stop indexing posts on Blogspot. The growth of spam blogs has accelerated in recent months, fueled by automated tools that can create blogs on Blogspot and some similar services and populate them with keyword-optimized posts and Google AdSense advertisements.
About 39,000 fake blogs have been created on the web in the past two weeks, according to an analysis by Technorati, or about 4.6 percent of the 805,000 new weblogs created in that period. FightSplog, which has been monitoring new blogs at Blogspot, recently documented 2,763 porn splogs created by a single "splogger." Blogspot-based spam blogs recently began featuring names of prominent bloggers in posts, boosting the splogs' visibility in searches at web-based RSS aggregators like Feedster, PubSub and Bloglines.
The move prompted IceRocket to stop indexing new posts from Blogspot.com, according to a blunt post from Mark Cuban, a major investor in IceRocket. Cuban says Blogspot indexing will resume once filters are adjusted, but warned Google to fix the problem or face a permanent ban. Bloggers are also focusing their fire on Google, which has stepped up its splog-squashing efforts in recent weeks but still can't keep pace with the automated instasplogs. "If your motto truly is to do no evil, then you need to start putting some resources behind an effort to curb this train wreck," LockerGnome's Chris Pirillo advised Google.
"Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning," writes Dave Winer at Scripting News. "It won't be long before Google itself is infested. ... It's time for Google to get on top of this. They're both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank."
But Google itself seems to have closed that hole, according to Jeff Jarvis, who noted that searches on Google are free from the splog listings found in identical searches on PubSub and IceRocket, among others. "Google needs to both fix Blogspot and share its secrets for ignoring blogspam," Jarvis writes.
Posted by Rich Miller at October 17, 2005 04:38 AM
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