Splogs!

Quick, run for the hills, the splogs are coming! Yeah I know, yet another buzz compliant word. A splog is a spam blog (SPam-bLOG), that is, a fake blog with realistic looking entries whose 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 fascinated 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 Tim Bray, Jeff Jarvis, Dave Winer, 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 responded to him regarding the splog problem.