Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Quote du jour

The Head Lemur: Getting shot is preferable to Golf. Having played golf and been shot, I can say this.

An old quote in blog-time, but too hard to pass up.

Flunking the Splog Turing test

So yesterday I posted Syndicating your balls, which pointed back to a site of unclear provenance. I was in a meeting and a hurry to post a pointer to what I thought was an interesting post. Big mistake.

Turns out it was a post by Dave Winer that I had missed reading — and worse, didn't recognize immediately as Dave's. (I remember a small voice in the back of my mind saying "it kinda looks like something from Dave...", but I didn't see it on his blog, so I didn't check any farther.)

It didn't occur to me, though it should have, that the site was a splog: a spam blog created and updated by an automated process, mostly to game Google's PageRank and Adsense. They succeed when they attact Google ads and make money from click-throughs. (I imagine it works the same way for other automated advertising placement service, though so far I've only seen Google's on splogs.)

RSS is a hot topic, and no doubt attracting advertisers who bid up payments for click-throughs. So the sploggers are on the RSS case, along with Mesothelioma and a pile of other topics for which unknown quantities of fake sites are created every day.

Search for RSS right now on Blogsearch.google.com, Bloglines, Blogpulse, Feedster, Icerocket and Technorati and see what you find. I don't have time to check, but a huge percentage of the aggregate results are splogs.

Carving Joape.com down to its bare index page didn't go anywhere yesterday. That should have been a clue. Today it does: to something called Dynamic Site Generator. Uh oh.

I've said before this is a huge issue. Here's regrettable proof it still is.

My apologies.

[Later...] Here's a blog that points to what appears to be splog that has scraped and posted a Maureen Down op-ed from behind the NY Times new paywall. The real blog points to the fake blog, saying "A blogger puts up the behind-the-firewall Dowd of the Day..."