Something’s rotten in the Blogosphere and it’s not completely clear where the stench originates, or whose effluence is compounding the matter. After the recent Blogger splogbomb, the chorus can’t agree on whether the smeller’s the feller or if the denier’s the supplier.
The saga began over the weekend while most of us on the West side (hemispherically) were immersed in beer in and football, tattered boxers upsetting the missus. Some “resourceful little bastard” dropped an automated keyword spam blog generator RSS sucker thing (afterwards to be known as the splog-bomb), taking advantage of the names of popular bloggers, like Dave Winer, Tim Bray, and Dan Gillmor, as key search terms.
Matthew Haughey, a former Blogger developer, was quick to notice the blogospheric wobble after a standard bi-weekly ego search to see if anybody had mentioned him.
“This morning, I had 67 matches for the term which is really unusual. Looking at the results painted quite a picture. It looks like one monster spam blogger has unleashed a boatload of new blogspot blogs, always in the form of keyword-(random number).blogspot.com (like lottery-123123.blogspot.com).
“They suck in RSS feeds from blogs like mine and boingboing and others, then insert random phrases into the copy, with a link to their own sites using phrases they want to game google with,” Haughey said Sunday.
Haughey and other well-known bloggers like the ones mentioned above were the first to document the problem.
But the event received serious attention on Monday after IceRocket’s Mark Cuban reacted post haste with a bomb of his own. Cuban announced on his weblog that his search engine would be blocking blogspot.com URL’s until Google fixed the problem.
All this attention prompted Google to respond immediately on its Blogger Buzz weblog. Blogger’s Jason Goldman posted a long address to the blog community, vowing to approach the problem, but never really intimated exactly how that would happen. Goldman suggests that Blog*Spot can “improve the quality of the Recently Updated information” they publish, and “make it more difficult for suspected spammers to create content.” They’ve also created an index of deleted subdomains-a really long list.
That explanation didn’t cut much mustard with our resident crime fighter at the Fighting Splog weblog, who has selflessly devoted himself to reporting the splog scourge. Regularly updated with announcements like (da-da-da) “697 Splogs Deleted,” and “2529 Splogs Deleted” (that is to be read with hands on hips and deep sustained booming voice), SplogFighter says a list of deleted subdomains isn’t really proof of action.
“I think it’s long overdue for some real actions on the part of Google to do something. It’s pretty clear the Flag as Objectionable button doesn’t work and it has failed miserably. Depending on time of day there is just as many splogs in Next Blog ring as before flagging was implemented,” writes SplogFighter.
Technorati’s David Siffry was quick to join the conversation on Monday as well, but unlike Blogger detractors, said the splog bomb episode has been exaggerated.
“[W]e’ve experienced much worse spam attacks in the past. The key difference in the spam attack over the weekend is that the attackers’ posts included many popular search terms including popular bloggers’ names – which is a common ego search on engines like Technorati. This made this particular attack much more visible to a number of high profile bloggers than attacks in the past,” writes Siffry who claims that the splogs only take up residence in about 4.6% of the total blogosphere.
In other words, the vanity becomes a magnifying glass as bloggers ego search their days away. Siffry’s jab at ego feeders was followed by a left hook in the general direction of Cuban, when Siffry espoused the opinion that blocking Blogger altogether was a hasty move.
“[W]e can still provide you with comprehensive timely results without having to do anything drastic, like removing a major hosting provider with millions of legitimate blogs from our indexes,” asserts Siffry while linking Cuban’s weblog.
But perhaps the most interesting observation comes from Jeff Jarvis who notes that while PubSub and other search engines have been clogged up with splogs, a similar ego search on Google’s Blogsearch returned no spam at all.
This could have an interesting implication (though other theories can and will develop). It’s possible that Google can somehow filter splogs from its own engine, the other engines have yet to discover how, and Google hasn’t provided those high-tech details to the others.
