For many blogs the bulk of their content comes not from their posts, but from their comments. It is not uncommon for a blog to have only a few hundred words of text per post, perhaps even less, and many thousands of words in comments.

For bloggers, this is a very good deal. Not only do comments promote a sense of community, add value to the site and encourage repeat visitors, it also adds a great deal of search engine-friendly content that helps to grow the blog.

But the power of comments has caused many bloggers to be worried about what rights they have over them. What happens if a spammer begins to scrape the comment feed? What if a commenter changes his or her mind and asks for the post removed? What happens if I move to another site or service?

Unfortunately, these are not simple questions but they are important ones for bloggers to be aware of, especially since disputes over comments are happening more and more frequently. read more

When Steven Carrol of The Next Web admitted to using a content generation service known as Datapresser, reportedly after seeing it used by an unnamed author at TechCrunch, he seemed to indicate that it was the future of mainstream blog publishing.

But while there is no doubt that at least some mainstream blogs use content creation tools to aid in meeting their deadlines, content generation has found a much more comfortable home with another group, spammers.

Creating content from nothing has always been something of a holy grail for spammers. Traditionally, filling their junk blogs has required scraping content from article databases, other blogs (usually without permission) or other sources. This has made them easy for search engines to spot and also drawn the ire of many bloggers who have had their content reused.

But technology is advancing and content generation is becoming increasingly practical. Many spammers have already moved to it and it seems likely that others will follow soon. This has some strong implications for both the future of spam and the Web itself. read more