With all this talk about remixes, Jeremy’s mulled it over and Wired did a nice piece on it this month as well… it’s got me thinking. IMHO Remixing is media spam. Let me explain before you tell me to shut up.
Using other people’s creative works to produce your own creative work is the essence of remixing. When done right the results are amazing and can be found in all forms of media. From dangermouse to Tarantino, we’re all familiar with the results of good remixes. But I see another form of remixing most people don’t understand and may not agree with me on. I think seo spammers are remix artists of sorts, at least these days anyway.
One of the biggest areas of search engine optimization spam nowadays is content spamming. Taking content from other sites [on of the most well known examples is the displaying of search results that have been screenscraped from google or yahoo] on sites for purposes of ranking well. The other main area of content spam is software like ArticleBot [www.articlebot.com – not willing to place a real link to their site]. Articlebot will take any paragraph or piece of content and rearrange [remix] the words and then spammers create doorway pages with this content and it’s virtually undetectable by the major search engines.
I’d like to encourage those of you who have your own thoughts on this to write your own pieces about content remixing and post them to your blogs. Send me the links and I’ll aggregate them here in a later post. I want to hear Barry Schwartz and I’m in need of a good SearchViews fix and think this topic is right up their alley. That’s right Erin Bradley, I’m calling you out on this one, let’s see watcha got, aight!
Jason Dowdell is a technology entrepreneur and operates the Marketing Shift blog.
