Quick, run for the hills, the splogs are coming! Yeah I know, yet another buzz complient word. A splog is a spam blog (SPam-bLOG), that is, a fake blog with realistic looking entries who’s sole purpose in life is to game search engines for page rank (the evil side of SEO). Over the weekend, excerpts from blogs that mention “Laughing Squid” have been scraped and used on numerous Blogspot blogs that are being automatically generated at a staggering rate (over 20 splogs for me alone so far in the last 24 hours). In my case, some really strange splogs are showing up on my watchlists which seem to be facinated with cyberpunk sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling. They include segments from numerous blogs that mention him, including one with a photo featuring Bruce that I uploaded to Flickr from Bruce’s closing party at SXSW earlier this year.
Looks like I’m not alone, several other bloggers are reporting on this, including Chris Pirillo, Tim Bray, Jeff Jarvis, Dave Winer, Dan Gillmor and Matt Haughey. Many of them, including Mark Cuban, are trying to put pressure on Google (who owns Blogger, which runs the Blogspot service) to act quickly to stop the spread of these splogs. If you come across one on Blogspot, you can mark it for review, by turning on the abuse flag on the top menu bar.
UPDATE: Chris Pirillo reports that Google has personally responed to him regarding the splog problem.
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I had a bunch of these show up over the weekend as well. They all seemed to pick up a story I wrote about being hasseled for using my tripod in Grand Centreal Terminal in New York.
This may not be a new thing; I found a weird weblog that sounds like it could have been a splog over a year ago, with a design ripped off from another (real) weblog. I emailed the owner of the latter to tell him of the former, but I hadn’t thought anything of the implications of such a fake weblog. Since it was the only one I had run across, maybe it was a test or a failed experiment?