Thursday, August 25, 2005
Next Splog
Spent a few minutes (far longer than intended) going through blogger's Next Blog "ring". Wow, I didn't realize how crappy blogger had become. At one point Next Blog took me to 6 splogs in a row. Apparently Google should rename the button to Next Splog. I kind of wish my blog wasn't hosted here now, but I am not going to move just because of spammers.
Well, here are the list of obvious splogs I ran across (you may notice several are nearly identical):
So other than going on a flaging spree and seeing how full of splogs blogger really is, what did I learn from this?
Well, I am glad you asked. I confirmed what I already suspected about the "flag as objectionable" feature; a single user's vote does not immediately get a blog removed from the next blog "ring." I found that out because I was still seeing some of the same spammy blogs (with my flag shown) as I traversed the "ring." It seemed I was seeing more splogs twice than I was seeing repeat legit blogs.
That makes me wonder if the next blog function is based on traffic or content or something. It certainly was not being chosen randomly from the entire number of blogs here so I suspect they may rotate through smaller subsets throughout the day.
As before, I assume someone at Google reviews the pages that get flagged (likely after several votes). It may even be automated based on the number of votes like GMail's wonderful spam blocking. I sure hope not. There are far too many splogs out there and too few people that would care to flag them. And of course there are lots of spammers out there that likely already have me so flagged you would never see this blog though the Next Blog button anymore.
Didn't really investigate, but these spammy blogs somehow blocked the new flag button on blogger's navbar:
promi
danceideas
wallmartnews
I saw a number of sites with makepovertyhistory.org banners such as this one. By putting the banner on the left side of the page it makes the next blog and objectionable flag visible but not accessible. Luckily I have Aardvark to remove it. You can always hit back if you are only trying to hit the Next Blog button.
I even found a number of legit blogs with no navbar at all. They had pulled some CSS tricks to get rid of it. I admit to thinking about doing that myself, but it is not really intrusive like the junk many free services force on you and I assume can get your blog removed due to violation of the terms of service.
While Next Blogging I did ran across a lot of legitimate blogs and few really cool ones. So I thought I might share some of them to prove that it isn't totally a Next Splog button:
Wallnut Gallery
What the Futch?
Solo Los Propositos Unifican
Well, here are the list of obvious splogs I ran across (you may notice several are nearly identical):
So other than going on a flaging spree and seeing how full of splogs blogger really is, what did I learn from this?
Well, I am glad you asked. I confirmed what I already suspected about the "flag as objectionable" feature; a single user's vote does not immediately get a blog removed from the next blog "ring." I found that out because I was still seeing some of the same spammy blogs (with my flag shown) as I traversed the "ring." It seemed I was seeing more splogs twice than I was seeing repeat legit blogs.
That makes me wonder if the next blog function is based on traffic or content or something. It certainly was not being chosen randomly from the entire number of blogs here so I suspect they may rotate through smaller subsets throughout the day.
As before, I assume someone at Google reviews the pages that get flagged (likely after several votes). It may even be automated based on the number of votes like GMail's wonderful spam blocking. I sure hope not. There are far too many splogs out there and too few people that would care to flag them. And of course there are lots of spammers out there that likely already have me so flagged you would never see this blog though the Next Blog button anymore.
Didn't really investigate, but these spammy blogs somehow blocked the new flag button on blogger's navbar:
promi
danceideas
wallmartnews
I saw a number of sites with makepovertyhistory.org banners such as this one. By putting the banner on the left side of the page it makes the next blog and objectionable flag visible but not accessible. Luckily I have Aardvark to remove it. You can always hit back if you are only trying to hit the Next Blog button.
I even found a number of legit blogs with no navbar at all. They had pulled some CSS tricks to get rid of it. I admit to thinking about doing that myself, but it is not really intrusive like the junk many free services force on you and I assume can get your blog removed due to violation of the terms of service.
While Next Blogging I did ran across a lot of legitimate blogs and few really cool ones. So I thought I might share some of them to prove that it isn't totally a Next Splog button:
Wallnut Gallery
What the Futch?
Solo Los Propositos Unifican
