Log In | Register
Splogs are the latest thing in online scams – and they could smother the Internet.
Just as the proliferation of email spam constantly threatens to inundate email providers, the explosion of blog spam is a besetting problem for the blog industry. Like most people who poke around the blogosphere, I had occasionally encountered splogs before. But over the months that I monitored the reaction to my book, they seemed to be rising in number. More and more of the blogs and Web sites that mentioned my book – or any other topic, for that matter – were spam. Some 56 percent of active English-language blogs are spam, according to a study released in May by Tim Finin, a researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and two of his students.
The blogosphere is growing fast,
Finin says. But the splogosphere is now growing faster.
To Jason Goldman, product manager for Google's Blogger hosting service, "the ever-increasing number of splogs is a significant problem that we have to combat." No search engine wants users looking for information about, say, auto repair to click on a promising link and end up on a page filled with jabberwocky or a collection of advertisements. Nor does any blog host want to waste its resources and trash its reputation by providing a home to spammers. A recent survey by Mitesh Vasa, a Virginia-based software engineer and splog researcher, found that in December 2005, Blogger was hosting more than 100,000 sploggers.
