Splogs Threaten Blogosphere, Wired Says
* Some 56 percent of active English-language blogs are spam, according to researchers at the University of Maryland
* A survey by Mitesh Vasa in December 2005 found that Blogger.com was hosting more than 100,000 sploggers
* One splogger interviewed by Wired (I'm not going to dignify him with a mention) made over $70,000 in just three months from his network of splogs
The article includes interviews with Anil Dash from Six Apart, Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress, David Sifry from Technorati and Jason Goldman from Blogger. All provide a lot of insight into the splog problem and what they're trying to do to address it. You can clearly see how important this issue is to them and how vexxing it is.
Unfortunately, what's absent from the piece is any accountability directed at the powers that supply these spam blogs with their funds: advertising networks. It seems to me that the splog problem needs to be attacked by not just the publishers and the search engines, but also by the contextual search ad providers who are making it easy for spam bloggers to make money. Google, Yahoo and others will need to raise the requirements for publishers who want to enroll in these lucrative programs. Publishers should have to prove they are legitimate before they can sign up for Adsense or any other contextual ad service. Perhaps a waiting period similar to the one for handguns is a model.
Is it unfair? Sure it is. However, like terrorism you need to attack this where the money flows. Otherwise, the spam issue will never abate.
Tags: spam, splogs, splogosphere
