when bad things happen to good blogs
update: i failed to include the url for the ebiquity research group study on the splogosphere. here it is — read it: it’s really good stuff!
i am amazed at the innovative research going on with the ebiquity guys. one really phenomenal piece of research is their work on splogs. what are splogs? before i answer that question, here are some facts:
- 57% of online us teens generate content, 40% read blogs, and 20% have are blog publishers (pew november 2005)
- 53% of companies are blogging (guideware, october 2005)
- myspace accounts of 33% of ALL web clicks (hendler, 2006)
these are some fascinating statistics. there is clearly a lot of activity and opportunity in this space. but, there are also some challenges — SPAM! back to my earlier question: what are splogs? wikipedia explains it like this:
splogs are weblog sites which the author uses only for promoting affiliated websites. The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. Content is often nonsense or text stolen from other websites with an unusually high number of links to sites associated with the splog creator which are often disreputable or otherwise useless websites.
a corollary to splogs are spings, which are ping spam or spam sent from spam blogs or splogs. it’s important to emphasize the reasons or motivations behind splogs: The purpose is to increase the PageRank of the affiliated sites, get ad impressions from visitors, and/or use the blog as a link outlet to get new sites indexed. many people have chimed in on splogs including pirillo and mark cuban. others seem to think that splogs linking to them is a sign of growth. how are splogs created anyway? there is software that can automate blogs, pings, and the like. the software releases a bot that crawls the blogosphere and post-jacks content, copies it, and creates a splog of its own. interestingly, the post title is always used in the splog. this is important to remember when i discuss splog baits. the folks at ebiquity have done amazing research into the splogosphere. they have studied weblogs data and innovatively created a splog bait. this bait was picked-up by many splogs shortly after the post was published. this splog bait contains jibberish — garbage — but the text has key words that rank highly on the adwords bid tool, which can be found here and the postitle in the splog is the exact same is it is in the authentic post title. this is one way to find out who has splogged you. here’s the conclusion from the ebiquity study:
- splogs undermine ranking algorithms
- splogs water down search results
- splogs threaten the web advertising model
- splogs indulge in plagiarism
- splogs skew results of market research tools
- splogs stress the blogosphere infrastructure of ping servers, blog search engines, etc.
ebiquity presents a unique solution, which includes characterizing splog features versus authentic blog features and probabilistic training to automatically determine which is which. for their study, they looked at weblogs data and blogpulse data sets. they arrive at some fascinating findings about ping times over a time series of splogs versus blogs, word counts of splogs versus blogs, and word distribution in splogs versus blogs. to read more about their great work, please go to their website. i’ll be posting a splog bait here shortly. i’ll report on how quickly and by how many splog bots have hijacked my splog bait. this will be an interesting study.
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Comments
Alex,
Thanks for reading. Splog research and Trust in the Social Web is a fascinating research area. Below is the URL where you can find some great data: the Ebiquity Research Group at The University of Maryland is doing great research in this area. Thanks for reading:
http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/299
Peter Abilla
[...] Shmula was attacked by 30 Spings today. I’ve previously writtend about Splogs and Spings here, here, and the splog bait is here. Splogs and Spings put an undue burden on the blogosphere by eating up resources that should be used for genuine blogs and genuine comments. Moreover, Splogs really jeopardizes the advertising model of the internet, especially contextual ads like adsense, chitika, and others. [...]
[...] Shmula introduced me to two new terms today: splogs and spings. A splog is a blog only used to promote another site, and spings are the pings generated by such blogs. The purpose is to generate ad clicks and to increase page ranking. Shmula also pointed me to the UMBC eBiquity Research Group and their effort to detect spogs and spings. According to their recent research, 75% of all new pings are spings. Tags: blogosphere, spings, splogsThese icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]
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Very interesting post regarding splogs. The market disruption this creates actually impacts a large amount of industries. For instance, let’s imagine that someone creates a splog bot that mirrors certain blog topics. Then, they sign up to multiple CPA Affiliate Networks. There is an amazing amount of content to plagiarize on the web, their obvious goal is to plagiarize content that ranks highly on Google and Yahoo, and most people will not be able to tell the difference between the genuine article and the splog – especially if the splog is ranked higher. Now, all they have to do is create as many splogs as possible, place well chosen advertisements from CPA networks, and reap in the cash.
On a side note, where exactly do you find these statistics:
* 57% of online us teens generate content, 40% read blogs, and 20% have are blog publishers (pew november 2005)
* 53% of companies are blogging (guideware, october 2005)
* myspace accounts of 33% of ALL web clicks (hendler, 2006)
I’m very interested in writing an article about trends in the blogosphere, fraud tactics, and overall internet strength – but I am having a hard time finding the relevant statistics to back up my claims.
+ Alex