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

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.

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.