Andreas Wacker

Yahoo bought blo.gs a while ago.
Their new blogs page is one complete splog-fest.

Verizon bought Moveover.com and will switch weblogs.com servers next week. That will be interesting.

Since the
last sploglosion event also diluted peoples ego searches there is finally some discussion about Google’s ignorance towards this problem: Chris Pirillo demands that Blogger be fixed or turned off I can imagine that it’s harder for him to execute the P(i)rillo Effect.

Sidenote: when will stop the habit of leavng characters out and feel cool about it? (splogplosion -> spam world wide web log exploison)

And, of course, Icerocket suffers as well.

The problem is not new: seven months ago I had to turn of Blogger in BlogsNow. All future rewrites of BlogsNow knew not to trust blogger content. BlogsNow crawls Blogger as much as possible. But not more. That’s why BlogsNow wasn’t hit by the latest boom of junk on Google’s blogging tool. It does help to have very little resources: With BlogsNow I have simply neither room nor bandwidth for spam. Spam would have killed BlogsNow within days, if it wouldn’t be able to defend itself.

Over at Jeff Jarvis there is some discussion as well on the very same topic. Sreven Den Beste comments along the lines that splogs on blogger.com might be beneficial to google. They definitely are. Wether intended or not: Google knows which blogs on blogger get read and which ones not. That alone makes for huge head start for all search efforts.

The concept behind those splogs is threatening not only a few ego searches on PubSub: The internet didn’t work to sell dog food (web/bubble 1.0). Now the internet is trying to sell information (web/bubble 2.0). While this approach is much more promising, all that spam is diluting. And it hurts innovation: Much of BlogsNow constant rewrites go into the upkeep of the status quo against splogs and other malicious symptoms. I would rather add features. And I would rather be able to trust the information out there.

It’s the same with all spam: In order for somebody to make 1 cent somewhere there are damages of hundreds of dollars elsewhere.

Sunday, 2am Pacific, 5am Eastern, the blogosphere is active.
Hyperactive. Just that it’s all spam. Most of those so called splogs are hosted at googles blogspot.com aka Blogger.

Blogger is the biggest hosting outlet for real as well as for spam blogs. I find it very hard to believe that Blogger could not do more against spam blogs. They certainly have the technology. The six billion dollar question is, why do they let all this spam happen. First: They can. Google knows how to store vast amounts of data safe and cheap. Probably cheaper than anybody else. GFS and commodity hardware create an unbeatable combination that creates amazingly low costs per byte.
The second part of my explaination why 90% of all blogspot.com subdomains are junk is slightly more evil:

Blogger knows what’s spam and what is not. They know which IPs added which content. Those other weblogs that are not spam are an invaluable resourse. Blogger can tell it’s cousin googlebot where to go, and, more importantly where not to.
Others like Yahoo or MSN can not. They have to crawl and evaluate all that junk in order to find the gems created by all those real bloggers. This creates considerable costs for Googles wannabe competition.
“Don’t be evil” they said. Looking at a random blogspot blog these days it sounds more like: “Don’t be to evil to spammers”