The Ham and Spam of Weblogs

An anonymous reader submits "Will the blogosphere become just as spammy as Usenet? There may be over 10M weblogs out there, most of them seem to be fake spam blogs created to manipulate the search engines. Scott Johnson, CTO at Feedster, complained that "at times we see upwards of 90% of the traffic from Blogspot being spam," and the problem is likely to only get worse. Can blog search engines like Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub filter the signal from the torrent of noise? Or will we have to seek new approaches such as the social filtering used by Del.icio.us or collaborative filtering used by Findory to separate the ham from the spam?"

Comments

To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish Google had an option to exclude blogs from my search. Considering many blogs use b2evolution, phpBB, or whatever, Google could easily determine what IS a blog and what IS NOT and filter it accordingly. Google IMHO would be a much better place if I could exlude blogs and those stupid parked domain search sites from my queries.

I'm not trying to be flamebait; It would be a nice option though. ::242

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[aftk2]

I'm just curious - exactly _what_ would include, if not for blogs? Certainly, I can understand not including those parked domain search sites: they're gaming the system, completely unhelpful, and filled with bogus content.

But blogs? Sure, much of the content is poorly written, or not applicable to what most people - or, well, rather, 90% of a given population - are interested in. But in searches especially, doesn't it make sense to list results that include those normal people so interested in a particular topic that they blog about them?

For example, blogs can be very helpful when facing computer troubles, provided you're dealing with bloggers who know how to write for Google. This is a good example. I mean, this surely has to be more worthy of inclusion in Google than the lion's share of those web-based bulletin boards that get indexed - you know the ones, with the "Next in thread" and the replies that are typically out of date, or altogether unrelated to your original query.

Everyone's quick to dismiss things lately. Don't dismiss blogs, just because sometimes their content seems insular and not applicable to what you've searched for. That's a problem with the search engines, not the sites they index.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[bigman2003]

The blogs don't bother me nearly as much as "those stupid parked domain search sites."

I don't know how many times I have done a Google search, and the 3rd or 4th result comes back with my exact phrase..yay!

Then I go to some stupid, totally lame site advertising domain names, or listing other sites, or something like that.

I never have figured out how they get listed in Google the way they do though- because my search phrase is not listed on the page...so evidently they know something I don't.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[trisweb]

Separating them might be nice, true, but I thank Google for every time I've found exactly what I was looking for on a blog, especially when it was something really obscure that needed a human opinion, like a stupid setting in Windows I'm looking for, or some review of a concert that I missed. Blogs are information too; often better information than you can get anywhere else. I think what you're really angry at are "those stupid parked domain search sites", which are a little different. Just a bit.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[the_womble]

What about all the useful content on blogs?

There are also a number of people (including me) who use blog software as simple CMSes even for sites that are not strictly speaking blogs - are you going to exclude us too?

Finally, how are you going to determine what software a site runs on? If you use generator meta tags, they can be excluded or faked.

Incidentally thanks for reminding me to remove them from my new theme (I had done it earlier, but forgot this time).

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[Anonymous Coward]

Well he did say it would be an option. If the person who is searching doesn't find what they are looking for they could always turn the option off. Of course this won't stop spammers and people who remove the META tags and such.

Incidentally thanks for reminding me to remove them from my new theme (I had done it earlier, but forgot this time).

Sure, no one is stopping you from doing this, but you are no better than the advertisers who use Flash popups to circumvent popup blockers. Some people can live a day without reading a blog, deal with it.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[slashdotnickname]

Sure, much of the content is poorly written, or not applicable to what most people - or, well, rather, 90% of a given population - are interested in

pretty much sums up why blogs are not much better than keyword-stuffed spam.

the general intent, when using a search engine, is too find the best online material dealing with my keywords as they relate to each other... i don't want to read someone's self-serving diary entries that are more about cathartic releases than providing useful info.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[gbulmash]

Considering many blogs use b2evolution, phpBB, or whatever,

phpBB is a forum system, not a blog (though I've hacked it up to work like one in the pase). And trust me, half of the most valuable information I've found on line is in forums about specific topics where someone has asked my same question and received an answer.

- Greg

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[the_womble]

You are missing my point, it is pointless ranking sites by what software I use. Neither of the sites from which I removed the meta tag is a blog as such. Why sense does it make to penalise me for using Worpress rather than publishing exactly the same content using, say, Mambo.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[Tony Hoyle]

I think that there's a wildcard 'match everything' phrase that google have allowed some advertisers to use. I've typed in some really wacky stuff and got the exact same pages back every time... each time the title of the page is something like 'information about ' and the content is spam.. the URL is something like http://spammer.com/.html

The website side of that is easy... autogenerate the page based on the URL. The google side is something I've been trying to work out with no success yet.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[Tony Hoyle]

Damn slashdot.

I think that there's a wildcard 'match everything' phrase that google have allowed some advertisers to use. I've typed in some really wacky stuff and got the exact same pages back every time... each time the title of the page is something like 'information about (my search phrase)' and the content is spam.. the URL is something like http://spammer.com/(my search phrase).html

The website side of that is easy... autogenerate the page based on the URL. The google side is something I've been trying to work out with no success yet.

(another thing I need an autosubmit plugin for slashot... it usually takes 20-30 submits before things 'take' these days).

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[mdwh2]

pretty much sums up why blogs are not much better than keyword-stuffed spam.

Except the same could be said of webpages in general - that they are mostly poorly written, and 90% of the population isn't interested in them. Should we filter all webpages out of a Google search?

The whole point of a good search engine is to find the small percentage of stuff you are interested in. In the bad old days of search engines, this was done by things like meta tags where we relied on the web page to tell the search engine how to categorise things. And now we know how things got much better when Google started looking at the content rather than arbitrary categorisations - so I can't believe that people think we should step backwards and do things like "never include anything that calls itself a 'blog', whatever the content is".

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[Cyn]

If you're getting results from blogs that you don't like, then Google needs to improve their search / ranking algorithm more - or you need to stop prepending your searches with "current mood"

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[Pollardito]

the problem is that if you're looking for information on the web finding it on a blog is about as likely as finding news in the editorial page of the newspaper. the vast majority of the times that i've found something on a blog that was useful to my search was when a blog contained a link to some other website or a blurb from some external article

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[LifeMatesCanada.Com]

I wish google had the option to exclude the first 10 pages of cloaked pages, spam, affiliate sites, guestbook spam, forum spam, and random porn redirects.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[TheSpoom]

Referrers. When you click on a link in a Google search result, your search terms get passed along to the site through the referrer (your search terms are in the query itself). It's fairly trivial to capture each incoming referrer and add it to their network of domains as a link so Google will cache it next time.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[John Bokma]

As soon as that happens people start to mod_rewrite their URLs. So in short: no go.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[bunnyman]

Has this ever happened to you?

You have a problem, so you search Google for a solution. You think you found a page that discusses the problem, but it's actually just a blog by somebody who is having a similar problem. Adding insult to injury, they keep a list of "referrer links" on that page, showing that most people coming to that page searched Google and clicked it, just like you did. Since Google keeps track of which links people click on, the blog gets a higher pagerank, and it appears higher in the results for the next sucker to enter the same search terms.

I am not sure what to do about this, but it's not a helpful situation for anybody involved.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[elemental23]

On the other hand, have you ever looked for technical information and found it on someone's personal web site (whether a blog or not)? In my experience, after the official documentation, most technical information lives on personal sites of people who use the technology in question and write about their experiences, their tips and tricks, etc. And it's a damn sight easier than wading through mailing list archives.

Re:To me (most) blogs ARE spam

[frost22]

I'm not trying to be flamebait; It would be a nice option though.

Thats not flamebait, but -17 offtopic. You successfully managed the first post, and immediately distract debate from the real topic.

No. blogs are not spam, but there are gazillions of real spam blogs. We should deboate how to dela with them. But, now, thanks to you smartass, slashdot discusses if blogs are spam in general. Shit like this is all too common on /. these days - instead of contributing somebody makes some smartass ccomment or pseudo funny post and everbody starts discussiong that instead of the topic at hand.

And you got +4 insightful, while this will get me some flambait scoring. No wonder things are the way they are.

90% rule in force.

[Mal-2]

90% of EVERYTHING is crap. It just happens that weblogs trend toward a specific TYPE of crap -- SPAM. I mean you may think JeffK is crap, but some of us find him funny, so anything with actual content has to be not crap to somebody (if only the creator). That means all the crap must be content-free.

Mal-2

Re:90% rule in force.

[Anonymous Coward]

actually 90% of the "real" blogs are crap. That means 1% of all blogs are actually usefull.

Re:90% rule in force.

[trisweb]

Okay, great, so 90% of it is crap. It's a given, call it whatever you want. My personal favorite is the "long tail effect".

Built into blogs is a way to tell the crap from the good stuff -- they're linked together intelligently by people who can tell crap apart, and the people who don't write crap don't link to crap. So find one good blog, and you've found a hundred or more good ones just three levels deep in links. Go one more level, and there are a thousand. It's exponential. And chances are, most of them will be of the same calibur as the root blog, with that chance decreasing slightly as you follow deeper links.

So who cares if there's spam. It's not the same with blogs as with email -- the spam is intelligently filtered automatically, just by the normal process of each writer.

Now, if only Google could figure out a good algorithm to track it. It wouldn't be that hard. Just rate a few blogs by hand with a content value and a link value, and automatically give all their ancestors (pages they link to) a rating of (the parent site's rating)-[(number of levels deep)*(some adjustment factor)] where the adjustment factor is somewhere around maybe .75 so that links lose value the further away from the parent they are. It could be tweaked, but I think it'd work.

Re:90% rule in force.

[Anonymous Coward]

and we note that there is a 9% margin of error

Re:90% rule in force.

[generationxyu]

At least he's bettar than Penny Arcaded.

As with technology...

[h4ckintosh]

I personally feel that as with all technologies, as more hands are in the pot, there will be more people wanting/and or innovating. But, spam's never gonna cease silly :)

Personal blogs compete directly with spam blogs

[Dancin_Santa]

By posting comments rather than actual content, I am able to raise awareness of who I am without having to invest the time in actually doing serious writing. I can offer my opinions on any number of topics without having to find those topics. Many times, my opinions do not reflect the current zeitgeist of any blog I comment upon, but that is one way of garnering readers interested in my comments.

Let's face it, blogs are vanity projects. You could just as simply write in your paper diary and keep it under your pillow like a little girl. Instead, you choose to put your diary on the web and open it up for criticism and comments. This is just another way of demanding attention. Unfortunately, that is pretty time consuming and troublesome. Having to come up with original content every day to keep people coming back to your blog is pretty difficult. Imagine having to make yourself heard in the cacophony of spam blogs. It's a fool's errand.

Which, as I mentioned before, is why I stick with commenting in other people's blogs. I gain all the notoriety of providing interesting and insightful content without having to provide actual content.

It's been easier to become popular by doing this than trying to compete with spam blogs.

Re:Personal blogs compete directly with spam blogs

[ciroknight]

I'd say blogs are more than just what you've said. Hear me out.

Blogs are a new form of communication. Before, we had "editorials" which were published in newspapers, where someone of stature is making their opinion well known, simply to spark debate and interest in the public's mind. Now this is a turn for everyone to have their own editorial, and to foster debate and discusion. Welcome to Slashdot, by the way.

Secondly, they offer a form of sympathy to the author; normally someone either says "I like your book" or "I don't like your book". This gives people a chance to say "Well, I liked your book, but the ending could be better. I don't think Saffron shoulda died when she fell into the swimming pool" or something like that. Sometimes it's rewarding to write something, but you never know how other people relate to it, and this is just a great opportunity to get that feedback, instantly.

Lastly, it's an insight into the person. It shows what that person values by what they write about often. It shows how educated the person is by word choice and by sentence structure. It shows how thoughtful the person is when they ask questions. It shows how we're different, as people.

Honestly, I think the problem is that nobody thought about the problem before it existed. When we thought of the Internet, we thought of it as a number of infinitely flexible services accessible by port interfaces. When we sat down and thought of the way we wanted to put the web together, we wrote a common interfacing language, and ways of accessing that information, by a standard, over the internet. But what we didn't think of was how different the kinds of media transported over the internet would become. Had we thought of it, we might be using blog:// to access blogs today, instead of a certain http address, just as we might be using images:// or video://. Honestly, it shows how well the original system was designed, but then again it also shows how we pretty much stopped designing the system after it solved our problem (same with email, IMO).

Re:Personal blogs compete directly with spam blogs

[trisweb]

Imagine having to make yourself heard in the cacophony of spam blogs.

It's pretty easy actually. Write about something other than ****FREE SOFTWARE NOW FOR A GOOD PRICE WINXP WIN2K WIN98 FREE FREE FREE**** and I think you have a pretty good chance of people actually reading your material.

But go ahead, keep on not providing actual content, I'm sure that's a great way to get readers.

Re:Personal blogs compete directly with spam blogs

[Yaztromo]

Let's face it, blogs are vanity projects. You could just as simply write in your paper diary and keep it under your pillow like a little girl. Instead, you choose to put your diary on the web and open it up for criticism and comments. This is just another way of demanding attention.

I think you're over-generalizing. Yes, many blogs are indeed vanity projects where people say whatever they feel like about subjects nobody cares about, but there are good, worth-while blogs out there which have nothing to do about vanity.

Developer blogs are one such style of blog, which can be very useful. You can use these types of blogs to get "inside knowledge" on development projects, and get some insight into the developers themselves, while peerhaps learning some interesting tricks and techniques along the way.

Unfortunately, that is pretty time consuming and troublesome. Having to come up with original content every day to keep people coming back to your blog is pretty difficult.

You know, I've never understood why some people feel the need to post in their blogs every single day. It's like back in Grade 3, when the teacher insisted we write something in our journals every freaking day (I remember telling my teachers that I had nothing to say. They'd always say that I should write about my morning. But how many times can an 8-year-old kid write "I ate breakfast, brushed my teeth, and then came to this dump"??? But I digress).

I run a small developer blog that nobody ever visits (well, so far as I know :) ) here, where I talk about Open Source development projects I'm working on, example code in various languages/APIs, comment on tradde shows I attend, etc. But if I have nothing to say for three weeks, I won't post anything for three weeks. If people want to find out when I have something to say, that's what the RSS feed is for. If they want to know what I'm up to between times, they can e-mail me.

So I agree with you on this point. I think that blogs can serve a useful purpose, but if you're writing in your blog just for the sake of writing in your blog, and have nothing useful to say, you should probably take up a new hobby.

Yaz.

Re:Personal blogs compete directly with spam blogs

[16K Ram Pack]

It's more than vanity. Mine is more about stimulating debate and thinking.

Sometimes, it's just about being nice to people (like if I find a cool site). There's a hope that the right keywords might help someone find something. If you have a look at mine (no, I'm not traffic seeking), you'll see there are all sorts of posts, nearly all about things I've seen or heard, or some political opinions.

Re:Personal blogs compete directly with spam blogs

[mdwh2]

I manage to make myself heard in the "cacophony of spam blogs"; maybe that's just because I've got friends who are interested in me. Do you not tell your friends what you've been up to, or do you keep it to yourself?

How is making comments not also demanding attention? Couldn't you have written this on a piece of paper to keep under your pillow, rather than posting here and demanding that everyone see it? Imagine having to make yourself heard in the cacophony of Slashdot posters...

Like Technorati know what they are talking about..

[Anonymous Coward]

Look! it's M0nk3y Man!

Check out the rest of the inbred fat ass miscreants on their staff page:

http://technorati.com/about/staff.html

Human validation

[SamMichaels]

The guy makes a good point...human validation via captcha. If you're going to spend 10 minutes complaining, whining, bragging and/or loathing about something then you can spend 3 seconds typing in the word "uNFsaQ" to prove you're human.

If it takes you less than 10 minutes to write in your dear diary--I mean blog--then it's probably a 1 liner to the effect of "i think she likez me omglolbbq!!!" and you need to get off my internet.

Problem solved. Next?

Re:Human validation

[MochaMan]

you can spend 3 seconds typing in the word "uNFsaQ" to prove you're human.

Unless you happen to be a blind blogger. With all the effort people have put into accessibility there's got to be a validation method that can work for the blind as well.

Just mentioning this because I've seen this complaint several times by blind users on slashdot.

Re:Human validation

[ciroknight]

What about a sound captcha? A link on the page you click says "Read Captcha", linking to an mp3 file constructed of the letters put together. Not hard to implement, not too harsh on bandwidth. Of course, then the deaf would complain, and you'd have to use both. And of course then the blind and deaf would have to complain... *sigh*

Re:Human validation

[MochaMan]

No I think you're right on there. From my understanding of it, most blind users are using screen readers to navigate the web, so enhancing whatever software it is that generates the images to also produce a sound file would probably suffice.

I'm not entierly sure how many blind *and* deaf users there are browsing the web unassisted, but I suppose a broader solution would depend on what technology they're using to browse the web. Some form of braille reader, perhaps? If anyone knows the answer to this, I'd be very curious to know.

If that were the case, I suppose a more universal, text based solution would be required -- this makes more sense to me anyway. Plus, Lynx users can be happy :)

Re:Human validation

[eh2o]

The slashdot programming team seems to have a policy of ignoring persistent problems for years.

However there are already some major sites with "sound" captchas for the blind -- craiigslist for example.

Re:Human validation

[Anonymous Coward]

I mostly use my blog as a resource pool, pointing out sites I come across in my eclectic searches of the web, with a brief comment.

Thus, many of my blog entries take less than 10 minutes to write, and these are arguably *more* useful to my readers than the ones that take me more time to write.

Not that I mind captchas (as long as they're well implemented). Just pointing out that there is more than one way to use a blog.

-Eek

Re:Human validation

[desplesda]

Apricot juice sprayed out of my nose upon reading the word 'uNFsaQ'.

You owe me a new keyboard.

Re:Human validation

[cmdrbuzz]

Apricot juice sprayed out of my nose upon reading the word 'uNFsaQ'.

You should probably get that fixed....

Re:Human validation

[SamMichaels]

Unless you happen to be a blind blogger. With all the effort people have put into accessibility there's got to be a validation method that can work for the blind as well.

Actually, no. The ALT tag contains some simple riddle that requires logic beyond that of brute force or database lookup.

Down with neologisms

[Urusai]

"blogosphere"? Considering that blogs are probably the dumbest form of communication possible (a linear log of rambling bullshit) I can only hope that the Blogosphere is destroyed by the Vogon Constructor Fleet to make way for a colonic bypass.

Re:Down with neologisms

[nmoog]

hmmm, I like the way you think. Where's your blog on the subject?

Re:Down with neologisms

[guardiangod]

a linear log of rambling bullshit

Yah Slashdot articles and posts tend to bs that way...You are not talking about/.? Opps nevermind then ^_^|| .

Re:Down with neologisms

[learn fast]

Nobody tell him he's posting to a web log.

Re:Down with neologisms

[colonic]

What did I ever do to you?

Harrumph.

Re:Down with neologisms

[Bimo_Dude]

Hey... somebody mod parent up to nobody bypasses him ;)

Shouldn't be too hard to filter

[XNormal]

With email spam filtering you have to consider each email separately. A blog has a persistent identity and reputation. In theory, this should make it easier to filter blog spam than email spam. On results of this type of filtering is that it will will penalize new blogs in search results, both spammy and real.

Blog comment spam will remain a problem, of course.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard to filter

[Junior J. Junior III]

I've been blogging for years and have not found comment spamming to be a significant problem. I've received a handful of spam comments in my blog, and they've all been swiftly deleted and the originator banned from posting again. I filter anonymous posts, so if someone tries to post a comment anonymously, I get to see it and OK it first before it the rest of the world gets to see it. I don't mind anonymous comments at all, assuming they're real responses to what I've posted, but if they're spam I just delete them. And like I said, over the course of several years, I've received only a handful. Maybe like 5 in 15,000.

Re:Shouldn't be too hard to filter

[julesh]

I'm not sure what causes the difference, but some blogs get lots of comment spam, others get next to none. One that I read seems to get about 5 or 10 per week; another, like yours, almost none. No idea what the difference is (except perhaps that the former is what I'd call a "better known" blog: not one of the really well known ones like, say, boing-boing, but one that a large proportion of blog readers familiar with its specialist subject matter would have heard of).

Re:Shouldn't be too hard to filter

[stephenbooth]

My blog (on LiveJournal) started to get a lot of comment spam when it started to appear in Google results, usually on entries that were at least a few days old. The spam was usually vaguely related to the content of the post, so if I wrote an entry about (say) seeing a pretty girl I'd get a spam comment advertising a pron site but if I wrote about a piece of software then I'd get an spam comment advertising "CHEAP MICROSOFT OFFICE CDs **$10**" &c. I guessed they got my blog URL from search engine results. I figure it wouldn't be too hard to write a script that queries a search engine on key words that relate to the site you're trying to promote then get all the blog entries that are listed (look at the URL for blog sites and for anything else that would indicate it's a blog) then feed those URLs in a script that will post the comment. It seems pretty obvious that a search engine (the purpose of blog comment spam being more to get a good search engine response rather than directly promote to people) has a better chance of getting your URL and giving it a good score if it's linked from a page the engine has already spidered and apparently trusts. I stopped it by disabling anonynmous comments and making it so that any comments made by a logged in user who wasn't on my friends list was screened until I unscreened it.

One thing I've noticed litersally in the last few days are spam blog posts to community blogs on LiveJournal, mostly advertising cam-girls.

Stephen

Re:Shouldn't be too hard to filter

[XNormal]

Lucky you. Some blogs are comment-spammed heavily, mostly with links to sites trying to improve their google pagerank.

Re:first post

[Anonymous Coward]

what is the difference between a first post and your post?

you fail it.

It's True...

[__aaclcg7560]

Too much ham and spam is bad for you. No wonder the email servers are always choking.

Re:Quick Fix

[seneces]

Who is going to pay $1 to read about how your boyfriend dumped you last week and you're still crying in bed. Blog comment spam isn't all that hard to get rid of (filter links, filter content, or if you're just worried about search engines, use rel="nofollow").

Anyone who has a blog that you have to pay to comment on (or to see) isn't going to get much traffic.

Software is Not Social

[lux55]

I just wanted to point out that so-called "social software" is not social. Person-to-person communication through computers is mediated and indirect. Technology is a barrier to communication as much as it is an enabler. I agree that it is an enabler in situations where it is used to help overcome disabilities and things of that nature, however technology is used moreso by people who are actually avoiding being social. Email is often preferable to a telephone because it creates an additional barrier between ourselves and the "recipient" (aka person).

A prime example of software in a "social" context is the chatter that accompanies networked video games. This does not form real relationships between people. I heard a teenager recently say that his gaming buddies, who he doesn't even know by name, are like family to him. Technology has helped a whole generation and then some to fail to learn what real relationships are. When a teenager can't distinguish between somebody he's only ever witnessed virtually shoot ze germans and the people who nurtured him before he was able to take care of himself, we have a problem Houston.

And it's only getting worse. Now we've begun adding "social" in front of all kinds of new web applications. Anything that lets other users see your profile and the items you post and comment on them is seen as a valid replacement for real human contact.

There was a line from a movie I saw recently called Crash, where Don Cheadle's character says to his girlfriend "It's the sense of touch. Any real city you walk, you know. You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that sense of touch so much, that we crash into each other just so we can feel something.". The next time we use the word "social" to describe a new type of web application, I think we should give that some thought first.

Re:Software is Not Social

[croddy]

Messageboards and IM are very convenient for keeping in touch with people who have moved to other cities. What you've said would imply that we should restrict our social lives to those who live within a 30-mile radius at the moment. I think that's a far more dismal prospect than using another new technology to stay in contact with people.

People have written letters, sent telegrams, and called each other for hundreds of years. Long-distance communication is part of human social behavior -- regardless of whether your very narrow definition recognizes that.

Re:Software is Not Social

[aftk2]

You raise valid points, but what would you have to say to these people?

The passing of a forum god.

For the people who are mourning the loss described in the link, is their grief less meaningful than that of those who knew the person directly, face-to-face? Perhaps, but perhaps not: I know a bunch of people, some of whom I see regularly, but with whom I haven't had as meaningful a relationship as some people I've spoken to online, but have never met in person. Is there a qualitative difference between the two types of social interaction? Probably - but I think it's too easy to say "the way we always used to do things is right" and "This is new, and less personal, and hence, wrong."

Re:Software is Not Social

[lux55]

"Is there a qualitative difference between the two types of social interaction?"

While you did answer your own question ("Probably..."), I do like your response. You raise good questions. I definitely don't believe that only face-to-face communication is real social interaction, but I could have been clearer on this point. I'm not an absolutist, and I'm not pining for the dark ages or anything like that ;) If I didn't believe in communication through mediation, I wouldn't be here on /. right now.

Anyway, my real point is that these online substitutes are serving more and more people as substitutes for the real thing, to the point where young'uns are being brought up not knowing that there is a difference. Instead of getting together (in cases that are actually able to) they go online and "chat". Mediated communication inherently encourages more mediation because we as human beings form habits. And while mediation can still produce relationships (I can't deny that), they are less rich than direct unmediated ones. And technology is inherently a mediator, no getting around it (pun slightly intended ;).

To be perfectly honest though, most face-to-face relationships are just as mediated as those maintained through technology. Real-world mediators include our political and religious views, our egos, etc. which inhibit our ability to relate directly and honestly with one another just as much as the inability to see facial expressions on a forum.

I definitely use technology where appropriate to augment relationships at distances. I only see my family twice a year, but I keep in touch via telephone all the time, and I post photos to flickr for them to see. My sisters email me once in a while, which is great too. These things definitely have value, but they are no substitute for being able to see and hug my family. They simply help make the time between visits bearable.

Cheers,

Lux

Re:Software is Not Social

[lux55]

Oh, my view of human social behaviour isn't as narrow as you interpret. Please don't assume I'm an absolutist simply because I point out problems with overuse/misapplication of technology.

I tried to clarify my point a bit in this post:

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=154127&cid=129 29098

Hopefully that clears up any confusion I created in my first post. :)

Cheers,

Lux

Re:Software is Not Social

[Anonymous Coward]

To be perfectly honest though, most face-to-face relationships are just as mediated as those maintained through technology. Real-world mediators include our political and religious views, our egos, etc. which inhibit our ability to relate directly and honestly with one another just as much as the inability to see facial expressions on a forum.

Yep. I belong to a forum where, even though I've never met anyone there in person, I "know" a whole lot better than my co-workers, with whom I have to be "professional." E.g., I'll see a story on-line and post it to the forum knowing exactly who will respond.

I don't know if that validates your point or just shows how strange I am, though.

Re:Software is Not Social

[lux55]

I don't know if that validates your point or just shows how strange I am, though.

Perhaps a little of both. ;)

Have you seen the British comedy "The Office"? It's an hilarious example of the failures of communication (among many other failures too) in a professional setting. Highly recommended.

Re:Software is Not Social

[Kristjan Kannike]

There is a whole spectrum of means of communication, from face-to-face to phone to messenger to e-mail to snail mail.

Every one of them is different and should have its place. Indeed, I find that I say different things (and differently), depending whether conversing face-to-face, via MSN, or e-mail.

Re:Software is Not Social

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but even after reading all of your posts on this subject, I still can't fathom why the term "social-software" bugs you. It's software that facilitates interaction between people and sharing of thoughts and experiences. How the hell is that not social?

Re:Software is Not Social

[lysergic.acid]

I agree with you on most points, but I think it's worth mentioning that various "social networking" sites like xanga, myspace, thefacebook, findapix, etc. aren't necessarily trying to replace real social-interaction with a technologically facilitated ersatz substitute. i consider sites like findapix or thefacebook to be social networking sites because these online communities introduce me to people whom i could potentially decide to meet up with in real life. now, most people i talk to on these sites i won't actually meet in person, but the motivation behind the site is still to connect people who would otherwise never have known each other.

these sites would be much more effective imho in encouraging "real" social interaction if our society weren't so consumed with a kind of anti-social paranoia. we would probably meet more of the people we only know online if we weren't so afraid of each other. the media has portrayed the internet as lurking with pedophiles, serial killers, and rapists, thus we subconsciously dismiss any notions of actually getting to know the people we talk to online beyond what technology is able to facilitate.

i will admit that i used to be very anti-social, and i would go into chatrooms for hours to pseudo-socialize with people because i was too inept to do so in real life. but now that i'm much more self-confident, i use the internet for very different purposes. i use IM to talk to friends i can't talk to in person because they go to school in a different state. i still dislike conversations over IM or telephone, but i make use of it when it's the only option. and through many messageboards and online communities, i've actually made friends that i now hang out with in real life rather than just talk to online. the ratio of pseudo-friendships to real-friendships will always be very high, but that's true with real life as well. some people you will socialize with at a party, but never really get to know, and others you will build life-long bonds with.

that's just my 2 cents.

Re:Software is Not Social

[lux55]

Despite software being able to be used for social uses (within the context of software usage), the use of such software to the ordinary user is inherently an anti-social activity in that it serves as a preferred communication medium to better choices that are available to them. The software has social aspects, but its use by many computer users has an aspect of avoidance of real social interaction (there are of course exceptions, where a given technology is the best they've got -- these exceptions don't mean my point is untrue, they mean it's not true for everyone).

I say this being a full-time software developer for the past 6 years (and an amateur coder for many years before that), so it's not like I'm against software or anything. But I've learned that chatting/blogging/sharing links/etc. has its limits, whereas I can tell you I've seen many teenagers who don't know this. You may "get it", but that doesn't mean everybody does. I'm also an extremely social person, whose hobbies happen to be rather anti-social in nature...

I hope this makes sense now. I think I'm just repeating myself at this point. :)

Cheers,

Lux

Re:Software is Not Social

[lux55]

Good points.

I have a hard time believing most myspace users are there to meet real-life people when I see the line "So-and-soo has as 44392 friends." I can't comment on xanga or the others, as I haven't used them.

One piece of software that is an interesting use of technology for real-world social purposes is http://www.dodgeball.com/ (recently acquired by Google). Their slogan is "see your friends more" and since it's all cellphone-based, its pretty much determined that their service only really works in the real world.

Cheers,

Lux

Re:Software is Not Social

[not-enough-info]

I heard a teenager recently say that his gaming buddies, who he doesn't even know by name, are like family to him.

Perhaps this is more symptomatic of bad parenting than of decreasing traditional social contexts. Would you find it as disturbing to hear people of your generation or your parents' generation professing familial love for characters on TV shows? I've witnessed that before, and I think it is indicative of parents raising their children with ______ for a nanny.

And to be stereotypically frank, that teenager you describe probably has a lot of angst to push around and very likely would not even admit to loving his real family at all.

Re:Software is Not Social

[lux55]

While there are additional causes (bad parenting often being one of them) to anti-social behaviour, I believe my point still stands. Regardless of the causes for our anti-social behaviour, a tool that enables us to act on these urges is inherently also part of the problem (for the people afflicted by this condition). It's an enabler. An extreme example would be a gun. A gun can be used for self-defense, but having guns around does make it more likely to use them. Put that together with someone who doesn't have the most moderate temper, and you've got a recipe for trouble.

Also, while I appreciate your stereotypical frankness ;) this teenager is not the teen-angst kind, not any more than is natural to feel due to hormones and such. He would perfectly well admit to loving his real family. He's a good and moderate kid (and not in the "I can't believe he shot up his school, he was such a nice kid" kind of way), that's why what he said made such a strong impression.

Re:Software is Not Social

[Psychochild]

I'll agree with you, the term "social" gets thrown around a lot. However, I think sometimes it is a good title. My professional blog does get some good discussion on there about game development issues. It's like sitting at a coffee shop discussing issues, but it's not just limited to people who like coffee in my immediate location.

I think you need to consider a larger issue: what is "real" socialization? You mention in your replies that you aren't an absolutist, but your attitude here seems to say that you don't believe that anything over the computer can be "real" socialization.

Of course, you seem to accept the telephone as socialization even though that puts distance between people and aspects of communication, notably body language, are missing. You might even consider letter writing to be socialization; people before the telephone certainly did, even though there were distances between people.

Your attitudes are a bit simplistic. I prefer email to phone calls not because I want more distance between me and the other person, but because I prefer the more thoughtful pace of email. Both people can take a bit of time to put some thought into their email instead of being put on the spot in a phone call. I once had an interview with someone who insisted on calling instead of emailing. We had a fairly empty phone conversation because neither of us could think of meaningful questions. Yet, once we finally did do email we had a very meaningful conversation and were able to cover a lot of topics.

In addition, technology helps bridge those gaps between people instead of emphasizing them. I run my own business and some of my employees are on the other coast from me. I use IM, email, and the telephone to keep in touch. I simply could not manage them without all these tools at my fingertips. IM in particular is more useful than a phone call because I don't have to balance the IM client between my shoulder and my ear while I'm writing code and trying to compile it.

I also think you are quick to write off the interaction in "networked video games" (you probably saw this coming once I said I develop games for a living). At a recent conference I attended, one of the officers of Yahoo! gave a talk about how he learned valuable management skills from running a guild of people on an online RPG (aka MMORPG). He told how he went into job interviews talking intelligently about management issues like dispute resolution, motivating others, managing peer opinions, and so on based on his experiences in the game. These issues are largely based on communication, relationship management, and other social elements.

In addition, many of these games encourage teamwork in order to overcome a challenge. This is exactly the same concept that allows soldiers to bond together in a combat unit. Yes, it's not live combat, but working together as a team in a game could be one of the most stressful things a typical American teenager has faced in his life. So, when that teenager says he feels some type of kinship with other people, even people he might not know offline details about, there may be something more to it than some sort of mental disorder as you imply.

At the end of the day, the person at the other end of the line is still a person. Honestly, some of the most hurtful people are the ones who take your attitude, the ones that believe online socialization isn't "real". They're the ones who don't realize that there are other human beings out there that can be affected by their words. Real feelings can be hurt, just as real feelings can develop between people, and all too often I see people completely ignorant of this fact. Taking a broader view of communication and socialization can help with interacting with others, including through online "social" software.

Another viewpoint for you to consider.

Re:Software is Not Social

[lux55]

I don't think I can find much to argue with in your points. I definitely don't intend offense against anyone, to be sure. My issue with mediation (online or offline, the latter being much worse than the former) is that when used in lieu of unmediated communication it can prevent us from accessing the human being on the other side. Connecting and sharing experiences with other people is the entire purpose of communication, and the very thing that gives meaning to our lives.

Technology can be a great facilitator as well as a great hindrance to this. But then again anything with the potential to do great good (ie. connect families oceans apart), has the potential for greatly negative things as well.

Balance, I guess, is the lesson here.

Cheers,

Lux

Re:Software is Not Social

[Psychochild]

My issue with mediation (online or offline, the latter being much worse than the former) is that when used in lieu of unmediated communication it can prevent us from accessing the human being on the other side.

I disagree. I think that you can connect with people if you choose to. Allow me an anecdote, if you will.

Recently a person who I had met online (and have met offline a few times) sent me some chat logs she had kept. She was online and I started bothering her with a name she didn't recognize. After a bit of that I admitted who I was and we both had a laugh. The fact that she emailed me this didn't change the fact that we were exchanging a memory of what happened to us in the past. I felt the same way about her email that I feel when I talk about some of our college hijinx with my old college pals.

I suspect we're a bit early in the curve to really tell the future accurately. I suspect that as the children of today grow up they'll view IM and email the same way we view a phone call today. Back when phones were first around, people treated them as special and ranted about how phones were destroying relationships. Why, people didn't even go out to visit each other anymore, they just called each other on the telephone!

This isn't to say that there aren't some important issues to consider about these technologies. Every disruptive technology requires thoughtful analysis. It's interesting to note that we're becoming more disconnected with our peers in the offline space; most Americans don't even know their neighbors. But, I remember this happening before people even knew what the WWW stood for. I think people do need to connect to each other more, but demonizing online "social" software as the primary culprit strikes me as a bit simplistic.

Thanks for an interesting conversation.

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

This was pretty clever

Already is a moderated Blog Index out there

[OverlordQ]

QuickTrack, check it out.

Re:Quick Fix

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he was meaning that weblog authors should verify by paying a single $1 dollar fee, not necesarilly the guys who want to comment

Check out

[Greyfox]

The Customize Google plugin. I don't use it to block out adverts and would encourage you not to either, but it is handy for blocking out those obnoxious spammy sites that far too often show up in my google searches.

It was a bit unintuitive how you add sites to the filter list though -- just cut and paste "http://*.whatever.com/*" into your extensions list and any search results from whatever.com will then be greyed out.

Welcome to Slashdot.

[ciroknight]

Slashdot is a blog, created in the context of a news site, which we all come to and bitch about things we want out of technology, think is/are cool, and/or hate and want everyone to know why.

That being said, Google (along with other large search engines) have already taken stances on blogging, and are actively pursuing their individual stances. For most, this is creating their own blog service, and doing some shifting in their code to make sure blogs don't come out on top. But this isn't an absolute truth.

If you want these things, and Google doesn't offer them, make your own search engine, and do it better. No, seriously, don't look at me like I'm crazy; there have been over a dozen "major" search engines created after Google, some are only in serious use by geeky populations (AlltheWeb, as far as I can tell, fits this), some by the trendy, some by the "I hate Google"ites, etc. etc. It's as simple as that.

One reason I think Google's strayed from taking such a hardline on blogs is simply out of ease of use. Google doesn't want to complicate life with a million more search options, especially ones you can deal with yourself by subtracting out the majorly offensive sites (-livejournal -blogger -blogspot, etc).

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[croddy]

The vast majority of blog-style web sites are written and controlled by a single user. Slashdot has several editors, and all of the stories are contributed by visitor.

Make no mistake: Slashdot is not what people are talking about when they complain of the spam that blogs have dumped into Google..

Slashdot represents thousands of voices.

Most blogs represent one voice only.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, usenet's a blog, too.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[The One and Only]

God forbid that one voice be allowed to speak without needing to ask the consent of thousands of others.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[ciroknight]

Wait, how many Slashdot editors are there? Oh right, not thousands. Not even hundreds.

Secondly, haven't you ever heard of the Freedom of Speech, as guarenteed to us by the Second Amendement in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America? By your comment, I'll assume not.

Why should we quash out individuality so that one person can get to the content they want better? Why shouldn't we just solve the damned problem, instead of creating more?

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[Dun Malg]

I don't think talk like that ought to be allowed, mister

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[croddy]

I'm not asking Congress to limit web-loggers.

I'd just like them to shut up all on their own.
Freedom of speech doesn't guarantee an audience.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[ciroknight]

Take it up with them personally, then. Oh, or you could just use a search engine that actively removes blogs from their indicies. Or you could make your own and remove them personally. Or you could subtract out the sites you don't want in existing search engines.

As I can see it, choice is on your side. They have the choice of posting or not posting. You have the choice of how you want to deal with it.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[AngryElmo]

Freedom of speech is not a guarantee of audience.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[ciroknight]

For fuck's sake, neither is the Internet. Just because I put something on the Internet, doesn't mean anyone's ever going to see it!!!!

If Google brings it up as a top match, USE ANOTHER SEARCH ENGINE. The problem is you think services should cater specifically to you, while the company that runs the services is trying to think of the greater good of everyone.

Freedom of Speech is all the Internet is. Audience is you. If you want to look at the site, go right on ahead, and if you don't, then you know how to avoid it, assuming you are an intellegent human being, and care enough to do the work to avoid it. If not, then use a better service that caters more specifically to you. It's as simple as that.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[Roland Piguepaille]

typing that shit every time i have to do a search is a fucking pain

his point is that it would be more convienient if this were a cookie option (like the naughty pics prefrence)

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[AngryElmo]

"Secondly, haven't you ever heard of the Freedom of Speech, as guarenteed to us by the Second Amendement in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America? By your comment, I'll assume not.

Why should we quash out individuality so that one person can get to the content they want better? Why shouldn't we just solve the damned problem, instead of creating more?"

Dude - who are you replying to? I was responding to your commented quoted above and merley saying that Freedom of speach does not gaurantee an audience. If I choose to ignore someone then that is my choice. If I seek out tools or a service that allows me to cut down on the noise then I will. The providers of those tools, nor myself are interfering with your blessed Freedom of speech. Which appears to be exactly what some of your other posts confirm..

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[AngryElmo]

man, my spelling sucks today - apologies to any pedants who I may have offended.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[gbulmash]

Secondly, haven't you ever heard of the Freedom of Speech, as guarenteed to us by the Second Amendement in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America? By your comment, I'll assume not.

If what you say above were true, I'd be careful where you point that mouth. The safety is off.

The Second Amendment is our right to guns, not our right to free speech. Free speech is in the First Amendment. So

And be very careful. All the First Amendment guarantees is " Congress shall make no law..." abridging freedom of speech.

If you want to go to a public park and preach religion or recite your political manifesto, the First Amendment guarantees your right to. But it's not absolute.

If you want to preach/recite on my front lawn, my property rights prevail and I can physically throw you off my property if you refuse to leave voluntarily. If you want to preach/recite at midnight and you're preaching/reciting too loud, city noise ordinances prevail, and the cops can arrest or ticket you if you refuse to quiet down or move along.

Slashdot is required to allow you a certain amount of leeway in exchange for safe harbor protections covering public forums, but that is a matter of them trying to avoid getting sued over any libelous/defamatory content in your posts, not any First Amendment guarantee they are obligated to provide you. And if you go beyond that leeway, they can ban you from posting and erase your posts.

So if you want to argue in favor of blog spam, find another argument. The First Amendment has nothing to do with whether Google and other blog services should voluntarily clean up their act and put roadblocks/barriers in place to stem the flow of blog spam.

- Greg

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

He doesn't want you to type that because then you might block his stupid infinigeek spam site.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[KDR_11k]

Let's put it like that: You're permitted to express any oppinion you want but not just in any way you want. You don't need to scream to express your oppinion, you don't need to be in a cinema while the movie plays to express your oppinion so it's perfectly fine if they tell you to leave the cinema or stop screaming or something. You can still express your oppinion if you sit in a corner and whisper.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[Lillesvin]

I thought that the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America only applied to ... well ... Americans... But iirc Freedom of Speech is actually one of the basic human rights, which fortunately applies to all human beings.

Regarding filtering search results on google, then putting -blog in the query often helps a lot. Of course this shouldn't be needed in the first place/ideal world, but unfortunately some people seem to exploit everything to the point where it just becomes an annoyance.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[Anonymous Coward]

You can speak all you like; but, unless you have something interesting to say (you don't), say it to yourself.

I hope every last blog collapses under its own weight of spam, pathos, angst and half-assed reasoning.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[tootlemonde]

If you want to preach/recite on my front lawn, my property rights prevail and I can physically throw you off my property if you refuse to leave voluntarily.

Only the police can use physical force to remove a trespasser, as any landlord knows. According to Wikipedia:

Most jurisdictions do not allow "self-help" to remove trespassers. The usual procedure is to ask the trespassing person to leave, then to call law enforcement officials if they do not. As long as the trespasser is not posing an immediate threat, they cannot be removed by force. It is usually illegal to arrest a trespasser and hold them on the property until law enforcement arrives as this defeats the purpose of allowing them to cure the trespass by leaving.

Trespassing is a good deal more complicated than someone simply refusing to leave your property. For instance, on rural lands in some jurisdictions, the property has to be enclosed and and posted with a No Trespassing sign before an intruder is guilty of criminal trespass. Or, a renter's right to be on the propery he rents supercedes the right of the owner.

In fact, if your property is a shopping mall, members of the public may have a right to be there for "non-commercial expressive activity." When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution protects free speech on public property but not private property, it also noted that individual state constitutions may protect freedom of speech on private mall property.

It appears that your property rights are, in fact, weakest when dealing with someone exercising free speech. There is an implicit recognition that in some situations, free speech is a more fundamental right than property rights.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[mdwh2]

Make no mistake: Slashdot is not what people are talking about when they complain of the spam that blogs have dumped into Google..

I disagree - whilst it is annoying if Google results are filled up with irrelevant Blog entries, in my experience it happens far more often that my search results are filled up with irrelevant web forum pages (of which Slashdot is certainly a type).

Of course, sometimes a web forum page Google finds is helpful - and the same can be true of blog entries - so it's not entirely clear how to solve the problem.

The differences you list between Slashdot and "blogs" are irrelevant in terms of how useful they might be as far as search results are concerned.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[bogado]

Meanwhile in the day slashdot have some outage...

" I feel a fluctuation in the net, it's like thousands on voices suddenly became silent"... :P

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[Roadkills-R-Us]

One reason I think Google's strayed from taking such a hardline on blogs is simply out of ease of use. Google doesn't want to complicate life with a million more search options...

So add it to the "Advanced Search" page. A handful of extra checkboxes there, like "No blogs" and "No commercial sites" (anything with lots of currency symbols) would be easy enough to deal with, and wouldn't affect the masses who just want the "one click" experience Amazon babbles about.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[Pollardito]

it seems like that is what he's asking for :

"I wish Google had an option to exclude blogs from my search."

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[porcupine8]

Slashdot is very similar to a moderated community on LiveJournal (albeit on a much, much larger scale). People submit posts, the moderator chooses which ones go through to the community, and all community members (and in some, people who aren't members and/or anonymous posters) can comment freely on them.

I agree that this is not what people are talking about when they talk about spam, but it *is* a type of blogging, and not one that is entirely unique to Slashdot.

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[stephenbooth]

Plus the US constitution only really holds sway in, well, the US. Slashdot may be hosted in the US (unless it's been outsourced to a datacentre in India by now) but an increasing portion of the web is outside of the US and US direct jurisdiction, as has been evidenced recently.

Stephen

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[stephenbooth]

Plus there are many (and increasing) blogs about that do contain useful content. A lot of writers and grassroots pressure groups are using the blog format to present what previously they used a non-blog webpage format for. There's been a fair few times I've come accross a gnarly technical problem, landed up Googling on the error message/symptoms and found that the most useful result was a blog entry that was either someone blogging "I had this problem and this how I fixed it." or "I've got this problem, how do I fix it" and the fix has been in a comment. I'm a member of a few community blogs that exist precisely for that purpose.

Stephen

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[not-enough-info]

Secondly, haven't you ever heard of the Freedom of Speech, as guarenteed to us by the Second Amendement in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America?

Let me articulate that with my 12-guage. Oh, if guns could talk!

By your comment, I'll assume not.

My thoughts exactly.

Since when has the internet been beholden to the US Constitution? Hell, since when has the internet ever been a democracy?

Re:Welcome to Slashdot.

[Brightest Light]

Maybe this is a bit out there, but I would venture to say that the Second Amendment guarantees our ability to protect all the rights reserved by the people in the U.S. Constitution, including the bit about how "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...".

The Second Amendment was put into place to allow a seriously pissed-off populace to seek relief for their government's breach of the social contract. If the government does not respect the rights of the people, the people will in all likelyhood use force of arms to replace them with one that does.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution does indeed guarantee the people's right to free speech. Without the ability to preserve "the security of a free State", all the rights outlined in the Constitution become meaningless, their very existance reliant upon the whims of government.

Re:Quick Fix

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I checked it was a penny for your thoughts, at most just two cents, now you're telling me you want to charge a DOLLAR!? Well sir, I assure you I am real, and my not sending a dollar proves that I am indeed human.

Blogs and Forum Posts = Spammers

[hexed_2050]

People are using blogs and forums to post links to their own sites. These links show up as backlinks to Google, and due to Google's ranking procedure that determines which website is the most relevant to each search, each extra backlink pointing to a website can effectively make that website more relevant in the searches.

Luckily, Google is one step ahead of the spammers, and has allowed only one link from each forum to contribute as a valid backlink. Therefore, having 100 forum signatures linking to www.spamdomain.com will no longer give credit for 100 backlinks; Only one backlink will be credited towards www.spamdomain.com. The problem is, alot of people have not realised that Google has done this yet, and as a result, people are still adding 8+ forum signature links in their posts, hoping to cheat the search engine ranking system.

ridiculous kevetching about blogger

[sdedeo]

In the Wired article (I know this isn't about spam, but what the hell):

"Lately, it seems like almost every time you tune into your favorite Blogger-hosted blog to catch up on the latest gossip, meme, political diatribe or cybersnark, you find that the site is frozen in time. Or, there are multiple posts with identical content."

Uh, no, not as far as I can tell. "Frozen in time," perhaps, after someone decided to stop blogging, but I used blogger for six months and never had a single hitch. Apparently, googling "blogger sucks" gives you thousands of sites bitching about google's service.

Sometimes there are outages, when you can't get in to alter a post or something similar, but those were few and far between (at least they happened less than half a dozen times in six months, and it only lasted a few hours.)

I guess this is a sign about how popular blogger is. I mean, then only way to balance my experience (zero fatal errors in six months) with thousands of complaints is to assume that there are a HELL of a lot of bloggers out there.

Oh, and to those bitching in general about blogs: please shut up. Yes, there are annoying vanity blogs, but blogger -- and the blogging concept -- has been a godsend to specialists, as well as to political organizing.

Spam indeed!

[ImaLamer]

Is it irony you are going for?

The link defeats the Firefox pop-up blocker...

Re:Spam indeed!

[Tony Hoyle]

The link defeats the Firefox pop-up blocker...

That's not exactly hard....

Re:Spam indeed!

[__aaclcg7560]

It's called a pop-under ad. Yes, it's ironic you get spam with your ham and spam. Do you want green eggs with that?

Bad. Not everyone will be able to pay

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people in the world still don't have credit cards. Many don't even have bank accounts so that rules out Paypal too. Many credit card transactions are automatically rejected from 'third world' countries and 'rogue states'. These are probably the places that need online expression the most

All you create is a digital divide whereby those with facilities can blog. That just plain sucks, because I really couldn't give a shit about reading some square jawed, straight laced American boring asshole's blog about his SUV and his daughter's school play.
Sorry

2 years and no one will care

[HD Webdev]

99.9% of blogs are crap by people who can't bother to code an web page.

If they spent the time to learn how to create a web page, they'd also learn the value of CONTENT, not blabbering about whatever they ate for breakfast or how someone's opinion effected their enjoyment of that breakfast.

Re:2 years and no one will care

[madprocess]

As much as I'd like to believe that learning to code HTML will somehow improve the quality of websites, I know this to be false. Take a look at the old geocities, tripod and angelfire pages. True, many of them were made with the integrated editor, but there are as equally many that were hard coded.

Basically knowing how to write and knowing what to write is not a one-to-one relationship.

Re:2 years and no one will care

[Tezkah]

Why should someone have to code a webpage in order to have a blog?

Should a user need to know how to install their operating system in order to use one?

As slashdot geeks we sometimes get narrow minded, but there are different types of intelligence. Just because someone isn't a computer scientist doesnt mean they don't have something interesting to say.

Re:2 years and no one will care

[HD Webdev]

As much as I'd like to believe that learning to code HTML will somehow improve the quality of websites, I know this to be false. Take a look at the old geocities, tripod and angelfire pages. True, many of them were made with the integrated editor, but there are as equally many that were hard coded

That was and is mostly copy and paste.

If a person goes through the trouble of learning to code in a computer language, the likely-hood that their content will be higher quality is better regardless of the hosting company that they use compared to a person who uses a front end or copies other content.

Re:2 years and no one will care

[HD Webdev]

Why should someone have to code a webpage in order to have a blog? Should a user need to know how to install their operating system in order to use one? As slashdot geeks we sometimes get narrow minded, but there are different types of intelligence. Just because someone isn't a computer scientist doesnt mean they don't have something interesting to say.

Why reply to my post with something that has nothing to do with what I said?

Did I say that someone needs to know how to code HTML to post a blog? No.

Did I say that someone needs to know how to install an operating system to know how to use it? No.

Did I say that someone has to be a computer scientist to have something interesting to say? No.

Please bother to read and absorb a post before replying in a way that has nothing at all to do with what you are replying to.

You don't have to actually read what you reply to, but it would help in the future.

Re:2 years and no one will care

[madprocess]

Perhaps.

But being able to program, and being able to program well are two different things. And even if they become an expert programmer, doesn't mean that they will know how to use it properly.

Someone had to design those Javascript butterflies that follow my cursor around.

And seriously. HTML is not hard at all to learn. Or at least not so hard to learn to be able to put up a web page.

Re:2 years and no one will care

[Detritus]

You might try writing what you mean, rather than flaming someone for failing to read your mind.

Re:2 years and no one will care

[Absentminded-Artist]

I have been coding webpages since March of 1995. I have learned HTML 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and now CSS1.0 and CSS2.0 and... As exciting as all that can be sometimes I just want to post my thoughts and be done with it. There's nothing wrong with efficiency. Blog sites can be great time savers. I used to have a web journal, wrote entries in my Palm Pilot, hotsynced the data to my Mac and ftp'd it onto my server using Applescript - all the while snorting at all the newbies using blog sites. Then I decided I valued my time better. I opened up a blog in January of this year (http://thesplinteredmind.blogspot.com/ and have had a blast. I post once a week.

Now, my blog isn't going to be popular. I cover mostly neurological problems and how to deal with them. But I've had some fascinating discussions with complete strangers because of my blog and I'll continue blogging into the forseeable future. Because of Google many people find my blog despite it being a small fish in a big and noisy blog sea. Google is a great tool and I'm glad they index blogs. Now, I'm as upset as the next guy about spam blogs, but "crap" blogs are relative. You may read my blog and find it lame. Others, including myself, would disagree with you. But if you don't find the subjects I write about interesting or valuable, so what?

Slashdot cracks me up sometimes. What is it to some of you guys if somebody wants to blather on and on about their breakfast or their boyfriend? If the site is a bore move on, but you could tell that from the Google search, right? Seriously, I haven't found many blogs that come up in my searches that aren't related to my searches. Not as much as parked domain sites and adsense whores at any rate.

Not all bloggers can't be bothered to code a web page. In fact, because I do code I'm able to personalize my site. Every month I tinker and tinker with the code when I find some time. Blogging may be an exercize in vanity, but then so isn't hosting your own website. In fact, the whole web publishing scene is about personal expression, and what's wrong with that?

Re:2 years and no one will care

[tiberiandusk]

i've found that even most computer scienists don't have anything interesting to say. thats why they don't have girlfriends.

Re:2 years and no one will care

[julesh]

99.9% of blogs are crap by people who can't bother to code an web page.

Well, yes. But Sturgeon's Law is that 99% of everything is crap, so blogs are only a tenth as likely to be any good. And given how many of them there are, that means that probably most of the useful information on the internet is on one...

Seriously, though, there are good blogs and bad blogs. Find the right blogs and you've got a lot of very interesting reading ahead of you.

Friends only

[dacarr]

Livejournal, for one, has such a setting where your entries are "friends only". Likewise, you can allow people who are anonymous to not post, or otherwise have various restrictions.

Blogspot

[dedazo]

Blogspot is fucking overflowing with these fake blogs. Here's one example.

If you have a few minutes, click on the randomizer button at the top of the screen that reads "Next Blog" a couple of times. I'd be willing to say that at least 2 out of every 10 blogs is a spam farm.

It's just fucking sad.

Re:Blogspot

[sparkydevil]

I did what you said and you were wrong. Six out of 10 were spam.

Re:Blogspot

[Mikey-San]

Or we could /not/ click the spam blog, and not Slashdot the shit out of their page load count.

Just a thought.

Re:Blogspot

[dedazo]

Individual clicks really don't make a difference, and Slashdot has implemented the rel="nofollow" attribute in anchor tags to avoid cross-site spamming.

Besides, you'd only be actually making them money if you click on any of the links that are in the blog page.

Re:Blogspot

[Absentminded-Artist]

404 Not Found. Way to go! You found one very effective way to take down spam blogs: Slashdot 'em!

Still, I wish I could have studied that page for comparison. I found http://bobthebuilder123.blogspot.com/ one day in my blog referrer logs. I wondered why people interested in Bob the Builder had linked to me. They hadn't. The whole page is nothing but spam - all posted on one sunny day this month. If you can help me see what gonorrhea has to do with Bob the Builder I'd be very much obliged.

At any rate, I'd pointed this site out to blogger.com but would like to know what was different with the page you linked to from "Bob's" page because it's still up. Interesting side note, though. With the changes Google made to their page ranking system recently these stupid blogs may fade away. I can't find http://bobthebuilder123.blogspot.com/ in Google. No page ranking, no purpose for existing.

Re:Blogspot

[68kmac]

If you can help me see what gonorrhea has to do with Bob the Builder I'd be very much obliged.

Welcome to the wonderful world of referer spam.

I see this all the time on a website I'm administrating. Mostly from Blogspot and free subdomain providers. You can even follow certain individuals hopping from one such service to the next. And Blogspot is so far one of the worst to follow up on abuse complaints ...

Re:Blogspot

[Jedi Alec]

if(6 >= 2) { $point = 'moot'; }

Re:Blogspot

[Relgar]

I wonder if Google is letting it remain easy to make spam blogs w/ Blogger in order to get more data samples, to fine-tune their filters? i.e. replicate the internet problem in the small, with controllable parameters.

After all, why run through the entire gamut of blog styles and presentation formats, when you can just examine content-only from your own servers.

Re:Blogspot

[Anonymous Coward]

and you're bright enough to link to it. great work, dude.

and no, i didn't click it (at least).

Wrong approach

[orangeguru]

All these services like technocrati just measure quantity and not quality. That is why they are so easily spammed and abused. Just by crawling blogs and counting links and cross links won't do it.

And since most bloggers simply recycle and rephrase current events you need a different approach.

My hopes for the 'blogosphere'

[TheLittleJetson]

I hope it goes where 'cyberspace' and 'surfing' went.

Re:My hopes for the 'blogosphere'

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen to this.

I think there's a man, somewhere, who sits in an office all day thinking up stupid words for the media to use. He is paid most handsomely for his work.

He's got lots of readers

[Anonymous Coward]

On this site, he's the 12th most popular poster according to the automated Slashrank script engine.

Usenet has improved substantially

[Animats]

Actually, Usenet is doing quite well. The spam battle has been won; there's very little spam in the technical groups. Serious workers in difficult fields are on there. Check out, say, "comp.games.development.programming.algorithms", where the people who write physics engines discuss how to do it. Or "comp.std.c++.moderated", where proposed changes to C++ are discussed. Usenet has far lower advertising content than the Web, where, today, "content" seems to be a little box in the middle of the page, surrounded by blinking ads.

Re:Usenet has improved substantially

[Apuleius]

Ssssssssssh!

Re:Usenet has improved substantially

[robogun]

Check out pron groups with .nospam. as part of the name. Much less spam. And Usenet is still the only place where I ^H^H my friend can reliably download theatrical movies (alt.binaries.divx).

Re:Usenet has improved substantially

[antispam_ben]

The first thing I thought of when reading "at times we see upwards of 90% of the traffic from Blogspot being spam" is the "DO YOU WANT TO KNOW FOR SURE YOU ARE GOING TO HEAVEN? HERE IS HOW YOU CAN KNOW FOR SURE YOU ARE GOING TO HEAVEN" Usenet spammer, who linked to his Blogspot page of the hour (because last hour's page got deleted) earlier this year. He eventually stopped using Blogspot and pointed to various Christian websites, much to their chagrin.

I think the Usenet Cabal finally noticed and added autocancels to his multiposts (I once got headers, saw another of his posts, but when I accessed the body it was gone - shades of a resurrection!). Haven't seen anything for a while now.

This isn't rocket science...

[JohnA]

I use Blogger to manage my blog.

The fact that I know how to enter the necessary information for Blogger to SFTP to my server demonstrates that I am not seeking to link farm.

Bottom line? Educate bloggers on how to integrate with alternative service providers, and aschew blogspot hosted blogs.

The legit will rise to the top, and the rest will be safely ignored.

Offtopic, really.

[IvyMike]

Now we've begun adding "social" in front of all kinds of new web applications. Anything that lets other users see your profile and the items you post and comment on them is seen as a valid replacement for real human contact.

Del.icio.us has none of these features, and the words "social filtering" are not used to imply any sort of substitution of human contact. It is a system where you can file bookmarks and can find the most popular bookmarks as tagged by other users. "Social filtering" is the phrase that has stuck to describe this informal voting system. Feel free to suggest an alternative.

Your complaint about modern technology making a poor substitute for actual human contact may be valid, but really has nothing to do with this story or with del.icio.us.

I suspect you were also as disappointed as I was in school when I found out that "Social Studies" wasn't a place to talk to other students.

Re:Offtopic, really.

[lux55]

Off Topic: Guilty. Mostly anyway. It's the term I take issue with, not the site.

I suspect you were also as disappointed as I was in school when I found out that "Social Studies" wasn't a place to talk to other students.

I never found out, but I was confused as to why I got kicked out for talking too much... ;) Cheers, Lux

rel=nofollow attribute

[WoTG]

Simple. Have 8 different domains, or even 8 different URLs from the same domain. One backlink for each in the sig. I'll admit to doing this on one particular forum, but it's a web developer's site, and it's a common practice there.

The real solution, at least as far as search engine rank goes is the new rel=nofollow attribute for links that Google started using a few months ago. The best link that I could find when I was looking at this a couple weeks ago is this one. If it grows in popularity and the major forum and blog sites start using it on comments and signatures, the spam in blogs won't be able to affect search results nearly as strongly as they do today. (Unfortunately, readers will still have to skim past the SPAM comments in the victim blogs)

Argh

[Alioth]

I wish there was a way of stabbing people in the face over the Internet when they use that awful buzzword "blogosphere"!!

blame the programmers

[hostyle]

How is this news? And how did they not see this coming? Every single public audience interactive media on the internet thus far has been invaded with spam, ads and other crapware - usenet, irc, email, BBSes, forums, wikis ... Why didn't the blog software writers plan for this when creating their software? Is this not a bit MS-like by putting out software to grab a market and only later bothering with security features?

SPAM is good !

[Ray Alloc]

Besides, why try to separate ham from spam ? spam is essentially "SPicy hAM", and it is del-icio-us !

Yeah, that happened to me.

[DingerX]

Trying to view blogspot, and at some point, it harassed me for a login at some point (maybe I wandered in the wrong direction). So I used the firefox BugMeNot plugin, and voila`, I had a blog. Okay, so it was more of a wiki than a blog, I really didn't post anything, and it was always being covered by folks writing crappy poetry.
Then some dweeb from canuckistan changed the password and uses it to boost the google ratings for his pathetic little torontine blog about getting drunk with ron jeremy.

The "random blog" used to show that most of the blogs on blogspot were in fact spam. Where'd that button go?

Findory

[Nathan Weinberg]

I just want to point out how much I love Findory. Findory is a website that uses the news stories you clicked on to pick more news stories for you to read, and tends to be very accurate. If you worry about privacy, it even works without a login or cookies, just not as well. Do any Slashdotters use Findory? I just love telling people how much I love using Findory, especially the personalized RSS feeds.

once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

i've asked this before but no one has ever answered me. WHY DO PEOPLE CARE ABOUT BLOGS?!!!! what makes them so interesting? all the blogs i've seen looked like journals only they sucked more.

Re:once again...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was once asked what a "blog" and "blogger" was. From my understanding a "blog" was an internet page where you post stuff and a "blogger" is a poster of the stuff therof. What's so amazing and revolutionary about that?

I would however like to see online journals or whatever you want to call them removed from search engine results. I hate searching for something only to have to wade through pages of results dominated by the crappy journals of angsty teens/goths (complete with terrible midi music and spinning skull gifs).

Posting on an online journal is one thing, but do you actually expect anyone to want to read it? I don't care what you had for breakfast or who you have a crush on.

Re:once again...

[porcupine8]

I don't really understand reading random blogs. The few times I've done it, I've rarely found much that's interesting.

But I have a LiveJournal. So do a lot of my friends from high school and college. I can easily read up on their lives by reading my friends page, and they can do the same, and we can all comment on each other. It's put me back in touch with people I hadn't talked to in months.

I'm also a member of several LJ communities. These aren't much different from traditional message boards, but because I can view them in my friends list as well, I get everything integrated into one place. It's more convenient than checking five different message boards about various topics.

That's why I use blogs.

Re:Quick Fix

[Tony Hoyle]

Who is going to pay $1 to read about how your boyfriend dumped you last week and you're still crying in bed

A *lot* of people... and a lot more than $1 too.

Soaps, Reality TV.... Big Brother is the ultimate proof of this - a dozen totally uninteresting people sitting in a room for 2 weeks - gets top rating and is simulcast on 3 channels simultaneously.

Del.icio.us?

[darkpurpleblob]

Surely it's only a matter of time before we start seeing del.icio.us tags getting link spammed :(

Slashdot Karma

[Colin Smith]

Seems like a reasonable way to do it to me. (Cue Rob rushing out the door to the patent office)

Allow users to directly rate the worth of the sites Google returns in a search. Anything from "Not what I was looking for", "This is a crap site", "Nothing but advertising" to "This is probably illegal".

It would give Google direct stats on the worth of the sites. People marking competitors down could be made difficult through techniques like character recognition.

Interesting insight.

[Colin Smith]

We then get to the huge problem. How do you measure quality? In fact, what is quality? I think slashdot karma is a good attempt at it.

Re:Interesting insight.

[orangeguru]

I agree with you. Measuring quality is the real task and it's hard. That is why I think human judgement is better then simple machine sorting and linking.

Parking Services and Search Ranking

[miller60]

The domain parking revenue services often use cross-linking between the thousands of domains they control to improve their Google rankings. Speculators buy expiring domains, paying extra to get names with high Google PageRank. The aggregators like Sedo and Domain Sponsor use pretty advanced search engine optimization strategies to drive traffic to these pages .

Like email spam, these sites will continue to exist so long as people click on the links, thus supporting the business model.

WebHashcash

[DavidSJ]

The description from my WebHashcash site:

WebHashcash is a Java-based anti-spam mechanism for collaborative web sites such as weblogs, discussion forums, and wikis, to guard against automated content posting, fake user registration, or ballot stuffing. It adapts the Hashcash email anti-spam system to web forms.

Hashcash is a system designed in 1997 by Adam Back whereby all messages require a modest investment of CPU power in order to generate a "stamp" which will be accepted by the recipient. The CPU processing happens transparently before the user even tries to send his message, and it usually doesn't take more than a few seconds. Thus, a small and easily-verified "postage" is attached to all messages. This cost is negligible for legitimate users, but prohibitive for spammers, thereby destroying the economics of spamming.

Click here to view instructions for installation onto your web site.

um, I already use "social filtering"

[cascadingstylesheet]

It's called "using my brain/eyes" and "communicating with people".

On sites that I already know and like (including some blogs), people mention and link to other sites, like, say, blogs. Since I then go over there for real content, well, guess what, it's not a link farm; it's good.

Problem solved ;)

Re:Quick Fix

[gfreeman]

Who is going to pay $1 to read about how your boyfriend dumped you last week and you're still crying in bed.

No, but I bet there's a nerd market for the contact details of chicks on the rebound.

The weekly Del.icio.us plug

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times are we going to get this site plugged?

In case you haven't realized...

[BuddyJesus]

Most blogs are already either:

• Spam
• Crap
• or Blogs whose sole purpose is to link to another blog.

This has happened with almost all technology, from Email to Websites to Forums to anything.

/. is a forum, not a blog

[Anonymous Coward]

You can tell by the lack of bad poetry.

Blogosphere

[lucifuge31337]

Am I the only one who find the term "blogosphere" almost as annoying as "cyberspace" and "e-{insert whatever word you want here}"?

Re:Blogosphere

[PigleT]

> Am I the only one who find the term "blogosphere" almost as annoying as "cyberspace" and "e-{insert whatever word you want here}"?

No.

(Next someone will come up with the idea of filtering communications by the ratio of quoted to original text, no doubt...)

FIlter the signal?

[VAXcat]

You can't stop the signal.

Re:Quick Fix

[Sir Pallas]

The verification of a user account needs only happen once. There is a free UNIX host that does this, and there are a few of online games that essentially take a one time fee. I think that a lot of people would be willing to slap an actual dollar in an envelope and send it.

OT: About your Sig

[Anonymous Coward]

Your attempt to googlebomb microsoft using a "viral sig" is rather futile since the googlebot does not log in, and therefore does not see the sigs. Just so you know. Carry on.

Re:Quick Fix

[julesh]

Last I checked it was a penny for your thoughts, at most just two cents, now you're telling me you want to charge a DOLLAR!?

Well, yes, but you'll understand that we haven't raised the price of thoughts for nearly 200 years now (2c is the price of a thought at the moment, a penny is merely their redemption value after use -- thought recycling is important for the environment). This rise is merely in line with inflation, and you've benefited from cheap thoughts in the meantime.

city name spammers, too.

[EvilStein]

Google for "new idria, ca"

The first link *is* relevant, and maybe 2 more on the first Google page are as well.

The rest? PURE CRAP. Lawyers in New Idria, CA? Job listings? Home appraisals? All just SPAM.

(FYI, New Idria, CA is a ghost town. It has a population of 3. There are no homes being sold, and thank god, no lawyers there either.)

So, I was looking for further history & photos and I was flooded with marketing garbage. Take a look at some of the URLs. It's clear that they're trying to boost their rank based on city names and not actually relevant content.

The web is not just blogs!

[Roadkills-R-Us]

The web was around long before blogs. Google was necessary, successful and incredibly useful long before blogs.

Blogs are fine. But 99% of the time, they are useless to me when I'm searching for something. I'm often after technical data or reviews, and blogs are not usually the best source, or the best venue, for such things.

There's an easy answer to that

[Roadkills-R-Us]

This is just one more argument for not having all tehse srevices be free.

If people had to pay even a nominal fee ($12/year) the majority of the spam blogs would disappear. And probably 90% of the crap blogs, too. They'd either quit because it's not worth the cost, or (in a minority of cases) they'd actually start thinking more before blogging (which has to be one of the stupidest words of the last 100 years, right up there with "bling-bling").

Not everyone has something interesting to say...

[msmith911]

Even the most talented bloggers don't always have something interesting to post. Which is the main reason for a daily aggregate blog site like ... http://www.blogspy.net/ (shameless plug :) )

Is Google the government?

[mandrake*rpgdx]

No. They can censor all they want. Freedom of Speech is something that the government cannot infringe on. Individuals can infringe all they want. As long as I can get the information elsewhere and not through the almighty google, no right has been violated.

As the ONLY human blogger on Blogspot...

[Hosiah]

I see the points on all sides. It's actually 99.99999% spambots on Blogspot, with just me the only sucker who actually picked that pathetic platform to host my blog - back when I knew no better. That goes double for their "technical" non-support - any problem I ask them to fix gets met with extreme indifference at the very best.

I started the new one at Modblogs, and have had much better luck. Mainly, I just post the code at the one there - shell scripts and programs and such.

The rub is, while I would love it if everybody could screen out the garbage, I post (or at least try to post) informative articles - howtos, tips and tricks, guides, simple programs in various languages - and people looking for that particular solution have to be able to find it. The catch 22 turns out that search engines drop the index of my blog regularly, and when they pick it up again, people get all the spam in their search.

The solution is, of course, for people to maintenence their own site. Slashdot manages to screen out bots. Many bulletin boards do so. It's not rocket science. I picked blogs because they were a free web presence alternative to a paid site, without the "free web page" hassles of making my readers look at annoying ad banners and pop-ups. If any body out there has alternative ideas, I'm all ears. It does look like Blogspot has gone from bad to worse to panned out entirely.

Re:As the ONLY human blogger on Blogspot...

[Anonymous Coward]

This comment is just idiotic. Blogspot is just a platform to host a blog, just as Windows is a platform to run programs. Windows is not all bad. Blogspot is not all bad. Neither is perfect. But Blogspot/Blogger is a wonderful tool for people like me who used to WASTE a lot of time maintaining and hosting a website. I wanted a website to put up pictures of my family, information on what we've been up to, etc... I used to spend hours maintaining it, posting pictures, using album.pl to make photo albums, etc... Then I had 3 kids. Maintaining a page the old fashioned way is completely stupid for people like me who don't have time to waste.

Now all I have to do is scan in or uploading my pictures from a digital camera, upload the pictures with a click of the button, and then go in and type the text that describes what happened. It is formatted nice and neat. Then I can take the URL of my blog and e-mail it to my family, who can make comments on things that happened, etc... I can help my Mom make her own blog so that I don't have to scan in her pictures anymore and e-mail them to people. Remember, 90 of Blogspot might be junk, but that is true of the Internet as a whole. I am spending 95% less time. If I am on vacation or don't have much time, I can just e-mail to blogger and a posting will appear. Quick and Easy. If you don't like it, ignore it, but worry about something else. And don't click the "Next Blog" icon. Duh. Any moron would have removed it already with the tools blogger provides.

- Kurt

A 31 year old linux user who used to waste a lot of time maintaining a website and got smart and started using a new web hosting platform.

A z-list?

[Popageorgio]

Blogebrity could run an unlinked z-list.

Honestly, though, this is one real reason for A-lists.

Damn Spammers

[ArchAngel21x]

Just another reason for me not to allow comments on my BLog. I really don't need some scumbag spammer trying to pitch their product on my BLog. I look forward to the day when the patriot act allows us to throw spammers in camp Gitmo. Oh wait, that would be too merciful. How about we just declare them an enemy of the state and shoot them on site.

Free hot chicks online, waiting for YOU!!!

[SargeantLobes]

Free hot bareley legal chicks online, waiting for YOU!!! Are you up to the challenge? No creditcard needed! Hot babes

Sorry, couldn't help myself

I do not like weblogs and spam

[Ranger]

OK. This is pretty lame, but it must be posted:

I do not like weblogs and spam.
I do not like them RAM-I-am.
Do not like them here or there
I do not like them anywhere.

Not on a site, nor click with a mouse
Not here or there, not anywhere
I do not like weblogs and spam
I do not like them, RAM-I-am

Could you? Would you? With a goatse.cx?
Could you? Would you? On a VPN?
Could you? Would you? Behind a firewall?
Could you? Would you? On a wi-fi?

Not with a goatse.cx. Not on a VPN.
Not behind a firewall. Not on a wi-fi.
Not on a site. Nor click with a mouse.
Oh, no!

Not in a linux box. Not with firefox.
Not in a B-tree. You let me be!
I do not like weblogs and spam!
I do not like them, RAM-I-am!

I do not like weblogs and spam!

BotBlock

[dew]

I'm just in the middle of launching an easy-to-use outsourced CAPTCHA system at http://botblock.com/ - we'll be evolving it rapidly to try and make it easy as pie for web admins to block comment spam in an outsourced way. The difference between this and piece of software you download for your blog is that A) you don't need server access to use BotBlock and B) we can evolve BotBlock to use increasingly sophisticated CAPTCHAs without requiring website operators to change anything. I've already deployed it on my personal blog and gotten commentspams down to zero per week from several hundred a week. I'd love to hear what folks think.