While I can excuse those who overhype their Plugins, Themes, and contests on their blog, I have a hard time forgiving those who use their blogs as scams. As the blog platform becomes more ubiquitous and easier to use with a lot of automatic content generating tools and comment and trackback spam tools, blogs are being used more and more for the dark side of blogging.

In The Thin Line Between Legitimate Blog Models and Scams, Weblog Scout writes that there is a think line between a scan and legitimate blog model as scammers tend to use the same tools as legit blogs do, such as autoblogging WordPress Plugins, auto-pings, mass site submission tools, and feed scrapers: read more

I hate hyperbole, and what really infuriates me are claims that “there is nothing like this anywhere!” Oh, really.

With the modern treasure trove called search engines, there is little left in the world that can’t be found, and odds are that your original, can’t be found anywhere, is findable. Have you looked?

A few months ago, a WordPress Plugin author claimed that he had the first Plugin of this kind. I knew of three others published over the past few years that did the same thing, and two did it better. I didn’t need a search engine to find that out, but why didn’t he search first before making the claim?

A day later, a WordPress Theme designer told me that he’d designed a Theme that was such an original, he bet me I couldn’t find anything similar. I found over twenty five similar Themes with a Google search before calling it quits.

Another blogger bragged to me that he was going to hold a contest unlike any other contest. No one in the world had ever done anything like it. When I told him that two similar contests were held over the past couple years exactly like his, one was a success and the other a failure, he was really angry at me for taking the wind out of his sails. I wished him good luck anyway. Maybe his would work, but bragging about it as the “only one of its kind” isn’t the truth. 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

Many say, “It’s about time.” Others are saying, “We told you.” Either way, it’s as official as it gets. Bye-bye WTF blog cluttering CAPTCHAs. According to the Guardian in “How Captcha was foiled: Are you a man or a mouse?”, the CAPTCHA has been proven to not work.

While most of this ongoing series on WTF Blog Clutter has been focused on the blog sidebar and design elements, a big clutter element is the continued use of the CAPTCHA with comments with the misguided belief that it would stop comment spammers. NOT.

CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, created to ensure that humans can read the letters and numbers in a way that computers can’t, so automated scripts and bots can’t leave a comment on your blog. Pass the test and you’ve earned the right to comment. Except that the CAPTCHA techniques have been broken and bypassed easily by computers for years. read more

A blog post linking to one of my blog posts has been scraped dozens of times. Recently, it was scraped by eight different sites in the same day. The eight trackbacked sites turned out to have a single owner/webmaster using their auto-blogging scraper across multiple splog sites. I’ve let the blogger know - after the second time it happened - and now that it’s happened multiple times, it’s time to change strategies.

It’s now time to work together.

Have you received multiple trackbacks over time from an blog post with a link to yours and the investigation finds that it isn’t the original site but a scraper? What do you do? read more

It appears as if Google’s Blogger service have had some issues over the weekend. On Friday, they marked bunch of blogs as spam, which was quickly identified and written about. The issue was resolved on Saturday, with explanations:

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

This isn’t a good thing for Blogger of course, and certainly hurts the brand.

Fighting spam has proved to be a nearly impossible task.

The best and brightest minds of the legal and technical worlds have failed to come up with solutions to stem the flow of junk email, splogs or spam comments.

Every new law or technological advancement has just been an escalation in a never-ending arms race between the many who hate spam and the few that send it out.

To be certain, spam plays a much smaller part in our lives today than it did a few years ago. We rarely see spam in our inboxes, spam comments are largely filtered out and only search spam seems to work with any reliability, especially with blogs.

However, the junk content keeps flowing at an ever-increasing rate. More and more junk email gets sent out every year, comment spam is on the rise too.

We have managed to treat the symptoms, but not the illness. This is because we have been dealing with how spam mails us, one issue at a time rather than looking at the bigger picture.

It is time to take a look at the spam puzzle and how it all fits together.

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Weekends are typically slow times for copyright news. With the courts closed and most Web hosts gone for 48 hours, very little usually happens.

However, this weekend was a definite exception. It saw a veritable blogstorm over the RSS aggregation service Shyftr and its republishing of RSS content. Some bloggers, such as Robert Scoble and Louis Gray came down in favor of the service while others, including Tony Hung and Raoul Pop were firmly against it.

In the end, Shyftr backed down and changed its policy but not before drawing a vast amount of unwanted attention and dozens of angry blog posts.

However, now that things have died down some, we can take a look back at what happened and what it may mean for both bloggers and for other companies that may want to enter a similar market.

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It seems that a large number of bloggers run their sites with very little thought about copyright law. Though they don’t plagiarize content or scrape feeds, they grab images, copy large blocks of text and embed media without much thought to the original author or whether their use is truly “fair use“.

It seems that many bloggers simply want to share what they find interesting. But while that is a noble cause, some make the mistake of not merely linking to what they like, but wholesale copying and pasting it.

Though many don’t mind their works being copied, others do. It only takes one angry copyright holder to cause a great deal of headaches for a site, especially a small one, and many are caught off guard at exactly how much trouble a copyright dispute can be.

“But what is the worst that can happen?” Many bloggers ask. The answer, unfortunately, is quite a lot.
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In Google! Clean Up Blogger! Now!, I wrote about how a simple search for a news story turned into a massive multi-page hunt through Google search results of Blogger Blogspot spam blogs, finally finding a possible legitimate blog answer on something like page five but having to go through even more pages to find a second and third possible answer to my search question. I plowed through page after page of spam blogs and splogs, much containing copyright violating content and spinning spammers, although most of it was totally unintelligible collections of keywords.

In the article, I wrote an open letter to Google asking them to clean up Blogspot by removing the tons of spam blogs that litter its surface and abuse our content, as well as help us help them by making the process easier:

There has to be a nice way of doing this. Sure, there is always room for abuse, but let us help you. The good white hat wearing web users represent the majority and we are tired of this. We want Google cleaned up. We think starting with cleaning up Blogspot/Blogger is a good place to begin.

We, the bloggers of the world, really like you Google. We put your ads, search, maps, news, and gadgets on our blogs. We write our post content to meet your needs so you will like us. We design our web designs not just with web standards but Google standards in mind. Our lust for all things Google puts billions in your pockets. We live and breath through Google, so let us help you help us.

I’m not the only one to complain. In fact, bloggers around the world have been complaining for years about the vast quantity of splogs on Blogspot.
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