Saturday, October 08, 2005

AntiSpam Splog

Through Blogshares I ran across a new incomming link to my blog. The name was BlogSpam which I didn't recognize so I figured someone new getting into the fight.

There were lots of antispam and blog related posts. But as I got further down the page some of the posts looked a little odd. By the time I found the link to me I knew what was going on. This antispam blog was built by grabing posts from real spam fighter's RSS feeds.

Going back to the top to flag it I noticed the subtitle of the blog, "I set this blog up to prove that automatically created blogs DON'T have to be useless." Other than to "prove" that, I don't see any purpose of the blog. No sites appeared to be linked to an unusual number of times. I guess that avoids the splog definition. But just because it is not posting spam doesn't mean it is not useless.

So, do I think there are really any legitimate blog syndication sites? Not really. I can think of one or two more established antispam syndication sites that are more legitimate than this almost splog. But I could do without them. I guess they help get the posts seen by more people, but viewers can be confused where the posts really come from.

But in those cases the authors give permission to the syndicating site. This BlogSpam site does not ask for permission to steal people's posts.

Comments:
And as far as I'm concerned (and BlogShares as well), purely aggregated, non-human maintained sites are splogs, even if they aren't running 1000 google ad strips. The whole point of the blogosphere is to give voice to those who seek to be heard, not to provide yet another automated method of collecting information. Google and others are already good at that.
Edit  
Well, in this case I am talking about lists of links that actually are maintained by humans. They just don't post the normal bloggy content to it. They seperate their link posts from their regular blog posts on seperate blogs. Those aren't blogs that would make sense in BlogShares anyway though.

But automated blogs I agree on. I can't think of any legitimate reason to have an automated blog.
Edit  
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