Monday, August 28, 2006

Yo, Verizon!

Got yer mobile message right here.

I share the sentiment, after getting completely misled by Verizon about their coverage in coastal North Carolina.

Chemo for splogs

The other day I pointed at Ian Kallen's Google Web Spam Ecosystem post, offering no comment other than the headline, "Monocultural blues".

Since then I've been paying more attention to the surge of postings in spam blogs (or splogs — blogs that exist only to scam money from click flow through AdSense or similar systems) of stuff I've written for purposes other than providing fodder for scammers.

Check out the latest, in Klippert.com. What is that? It's fancier than first-generation splogs, which were easy to spot, with their oddball names and Blogger or Wordpress default themes. This one looks a bit more legitimate, yet it still has that robotic ulterior-motive look to it. That's because it clearly exists for a single reason: to make money off AdSense ads, using content produced elsewhere as bait.

By the way, I don't think AdSense is the monoculture here. Instead, I think the monoculture is AdSense-type advertising (a category of online advertising whose proper label I don't yet know, and may not yet exist). AdSense may be the largest habitat within this monoculture; but it's not the whole thing. (Even Ian's blog has ads from Amazon as well as AdSense.)

The bigger problem is that we all to some degree live in the monoculture of online advertising; and we contribute to it, whether we like it or not. Either through our tolerance of it, or by unwillingly contributing to it.

And I think it's time we stopped both.

Because splogs are a cancer in the advertising monoculture. And we need to come up with new forms of treatment. Ones that don't just come from Google and Yahoo. Ones that come from us.

So I've decided to do something small but possibly helpful, toward what I hope will be a widespread manners-enforcement campaign against spam blogs, splogs, adblogs, or whatever we want to call them.

I am using a new Creative Commons license.

Until now I have dedicated everything here to the public domain, because I've always believed that's where creative work should go anyway, once it's outlived its immediate and legitimate purposes.

No more.

I am now using the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. I don't think it's a perfect fit — not by a long shot. But it comes closest (far as I know) to expressing my intention: that what I write here can be used by anybody for any purpose other than only using it to attract advertising.

Because I believe legitimate blogs don't do that. And splogs do.

Calm before the... what?

Matt Cutts notes that Yahoo's blogsearch, which was part of its News search system and oddly delivered results in the boxed right column by convention associated with advertising, has disappeared. He points to a post by Amit Agarwal detailing the before & after. Also to Download Squad, which said that "this move was the result of the rampant splog problem and only a trickle of click-through traffic", and Greg Jarboe, who adds,

To get the official word, I emailed some of the people I know at Yahoo News to ask, 'What happened to the blog results in Yahoo News?" Despite the fact that today is a Sunday, Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesperson, called me back to say the Blogs beta had been "temporarily taken offline to retool the offering."

In an email sent a short while later, he added, "Maybe this goes without saying, (but) blog content remains an important part of our overall news and news search strategy. It’s worth mentioning again because I’ve read speculation in the blogosphere about what Y! might be thinking bigger picture when it comes to blog content."

Whatever Y! does, it will be interesting to see how they deal with the split going on between the Static Web and the Live Web, which are conceptually different, in addition to requiring different search methodologies.

Owdoors

Didn't blog yesterday because the kid and I went on a kayak trip around the harbor here in Santa Barbara. Wish I'd brought a camera along, but the kid — who has been sailing in summer camp and is more experienced than I in the kayak dept — told me it would get soaked. He was right.

When we rented the kayak, I also bought a tube of sunscreen, which I forgot, along with my hat, in the bag of stuff we left in safe keeping at the rental place. This wasn't a problem as long as it was still foggy down there. But then the fog burned off, and so did my skin.

Well, not quite off, but my face, arms and legs are all a delicate pink this morning.

The night before we had fun going up to Lizard's Mouth, a fun easy-hike rock feature on the Santa Ynez ridge overlooking Santa Barbara. That was before a Star-b-que with the Santa Barbara Astronomical Unit, our local (and very active) astronomy club. Great time.

Photosets:

Lizard's Mouth, August 2006SB Outdoors, Lizard's MouthCary Dunn, Lizard's MouthLizard's Mouth, January 2006