The Problem with Blogs

posted: 2003-06-13 17:35:11 perma-link, RSS comments feed

Blog-Spam -- is it Splog or Blam?

The problem with blogs is...

they are one directional. Granted, mild discussions can occur once the owner of a blog has initiated a conversation, but until that time, you have to communicate out-of-band -- email, phone, in person.

I just ran into this problem. On Jay Scott's blog, he asks if there are any business models based on RSS. I thought hard, and managed to come up with two. But one of them was insideous, and threatened the existance of A-list blogs. So before I did anything, I wanted to ask Joi Ito who is an A-lister who blogs about blogging ( a meta-blogger ). But she hides her email address ( smartly ) and the blog offers no assitance.

So here's what it comes down to. The A-listers have very popular blogs. http://blo.gs/most-watched.php will give you a feel for the most popular of them. And guess what? They allow anonymous posting. So, I can make money by using the mechanisms that advertise blog activity to identify popular blogs, and use the RSS to find links striaight to the topics, and post off-topic ads right into the comments of the articles.

Blog-Spam -- is it Splog or Blam?

Why doesn't it exist yet? I'm pretty new to official blogging ( I've been using private wiki's for years though ). Is this just a matter time?

When it does, what will we do? Require accounts? Then we'll have either closed blogs where only the bloggers friends can post, or the blogger will have to spend time culling through account requests.

Maybe I should start working on a Spam Assassin for MT in anticipation of this problem.

glenn1you0 said on 2003-08-23 02:11:29:
Uh-oh! It's happening!

glenn1you0 said on 2003-06-19 15:13:21:
just like spam, you can delete it. However, if the Blam is being posted in an automated manner, its going to hit a lot of blogs. Imagine if Outpost.com blammed a mp3 player sale on 50,000 music blogs using an automated spider. That's at least a minutes time stolen from 50,000 people's days. And even if everyone deleted it, wouldn't it garner all sort of peripheral PR ? Isn't bad PR considered good by many agencies?

Forge said on 2003-06-19 14:57:52:
But can't you control / delete comments. If so can't the user, (lets assume we all blog or check our blogs daily) just delete the "blam". Wouldn't really be worth the time to code something that I know the hoster would just delete in like 2 secs.

Howard Owens said on 2003-06-19 00:15:19:
What if your bot traversed pre-selected blogs, found the comment link on the top post, and posted just -- "Hey, great post. I enjoyed reading it." Then added your name, e-mail address and URL to the appropriate fields. Cool, uh. Here's the problem -- looking at my referrer logs, I get very little traffic from leaving comments. It's probalby more work, and more heartache than it's worth.

glenn1you0 said on 2003-06-16 12:00:23:
I think you are right about spammers not getting their bang for thier buck. Possibly because the blog audience is a little more internet savvy and may not respond to blog spam, even if it was appropriate to their needs. That said, blog's tend to have very specific audiences. If you have a product that is somehow related to a blog topic, you could reach a very targeted audience. They key may lie in determining blog audiences. Tools like Technorati and the much anticipated blog tab to google could help there, as could iTopik which is trying to categorize blogs hierarchicaly ( which I'm not sure can be done ).

Benz said on 2003-06-15 09:23:37:
I think that with few exceptions, blogs aren't that heavily trafficked and spammers get much more bang for their buck using e-mail to distribute their messages. What would be interesting, though, is if some devious, self-promoting blogger were to attempt to rise in the blog ranks by creating a "spam" responder that posts comments on blogs all over the place and drives traffic to himself. Hmmm. Sounds like a job for Glenbot. Of course, there would be considerable backlash ... but that would drive traffic, too.

jc said on 2003-06-15 02:06:29:
it's already happened. I've seen them hit a few sites, my site got hit with one once. Why it's not more widespread than what I've seen, i don't know.

Comments

2#2

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6#6

Orba commented, on September 22, 2012 at 10:25 p.m.:

matt mcinvale:you seem to know much about this subjcet, please write more.See now, I'd mark that as spam. The comment doesn't use correct capitalization or grammer, it doesn't contribute back to topic of the post, and it doesn't correctly address the post. These thing together make me wonder what the commenter was thinking. This comment could almost apply to any of Jeff's comments. Further more, the comment makes it sound like Jeff is knowledgeable in comment handling, based solely on this one post, but this post gives a personal take on how comments on handled by Jeff, not how to correctly handle comment moderation i.e. you can't be knowledgeable in an opinion per se. Now I'm not trying to say that Jeff is bad at comment moderation, but rather that there isn't a large learning curve were you'd note that someone is so much more knowledgeable in a non-technical task.

12#12

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The Problem with Blogs

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