E-Media Tidbits

A report from Technorati shows that the blogosphere continues to double in size about every five months. But a new trend has emerged: weblog spam. It's not just spam comments (which have become a real plague to anyone operating an open weblog), but also fake or spam weblogs -- called "splogs" -- which Technorati says constitute 2 to 8 percent of all new blogs. Sites like Google's Blogger.com make it easy for anyone to create a weblog in just a minute or two.

Unfortunately, it's also easy for a smart programmer to write a script to create fake blogs. Icerocket founder Mark Cuban complained about that in a blog posting Sunday: "I'm not talking 100 blogs with 100 posts each. I'm talking what could easily turn into 10s of THOUSANDS of blogs pinging out millions of posts!"

Why would anyone do such a thing? This started with Google, whose relevancy algorithm includes a consideration of the number of sites linking to a document. By creating fake sites that link to a revenue site, an unscrupulous operator can -- in theory -- manipulate Google's results. To allow its software to ignore potential spam links, Google proposed a "rel=nofollow" property for links that most blog software providers quickly implemented. However, it generally is applied to comments (often open to the public) and not to blogs themselves.

All of this actually provides an opportunity for local community websites to compete effectively with the global giants. Not only does a community website provide for geographic context for local conversation, a news organization can and should monitor and participate in those conversations. That includes keeping a close eye on new blogs and blog postings, requiring a level of personal responsibility on the part of participants, and quick intervention when spammers show up.