The Future of Blogging, The Future of Spam
An article from The Wall Street Journal about the future of blogging gives some interesting numbers.
Blog measurement is another mess. The latest word from Dave Sifry, CEO of the blog search engine Technorati, is that there are some 28.4 million blogs and the blogosphere is doubling in size every 5.5 months. Eye-popping figures like that have been thrown around a lot recently, but folks making revolutionary claims about blogging won’t like other Technorati numbers: Less than half of those blogs are still getting posts three months after their creation, and less than 10% — just 2.7 million — are updated at least weekly. That means of Technorati’s blogs, more than 90% are either abandoned or updated too rarely to merit the name — nothing kills reader interest or visits more quickly and thoroughly than a stale blog.
Still, 2.7 million active blogs is impressive. But how should we measure their audience? Technorati does so by looking at incoming links, which is the closest thing the blog world has to an industry standard, but doesn’t tell the whole story — not with search engines and news aggregators shooting blog posts out into the general fray of the Net.
I’ve been doing my blog for more than 2 years and have produced over 1900 posts. There have been more than 1,000 comments. Of bloggling I say, “I wish I knew how to quit you.”
This article discusses spam with particular attention to blog comment spam, which every blog author is all too familiar with, as well as splogs, which are rapidly generated blogs which are spam in and of themselves and are designed to drive traffic to other sites.
Peter Shinbach recently threw in the towel and shut down Bach Door, his online-communications blog.
The public relations executive from Birmingham, Michigan, was fed up with so-called comment spam. Returning from a weeklong vacation, he found a slew of comments on his blog that had nothing to do with communications: They were posts from spammers promoting gambling sites and prescription drugs.
“I’m not in this to spend hours a week cleaning up the mess spammers leave behind,” Shinbach says. Ironically, the surge in spam to his blog coincides with a decrease in spam to his inbox: Shinbach says that his desktop antispam software and his ISP’s spam filters together block about 95 percent of junk e-mail sent to his account.
Every time I log into my blog I must delete several spam comments which are usually for prescription drugs, mortage loans, payday advance loans, and gambling. Fortunately, WordPress puts them in a moderation que so they never make it to my site and I can delete them in bulk.
It’s very annoying though.
Comment spam is one of the new forms. Another is the splog–short for spam blog, a blog that is created purely for marketing purposes.
Some spammers create dozens, if not hundreds, of splogs that link to the spammer’s Web site, helping to artificially inflate its ranking in Google and other search engines. Another type of splog seeks to get visitors to click ads that link to sites that pay the splogger referral fees.
Derek Gordon, spokesperson for Technorati, a blog-resource Web site, estimates that 10 to 15 percent of the 70,000 new blogs created daily are splogs. CipherTrust’s Judge says he expects that percentage to grow in 2006. These shady blogs have become a serious headache for companies, such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, that offer free blog services. Many are fighting back with software designed to identify splogs, similar to programs that identify e-mail spam.
Bloggers plagued by comment spam can also get help from sites such as SplogSpot and Splog Reporter, which collect information on such content to help network administrators filter it out.
I’m not sure what the future of blogging is or how it related to my own future.
For me it has been primarily a way to sort things out in my own head and well as share information I think is useful with others.
It’s sure not a way to make money.
I’m thinking of moving my site toward less frequent posting but more in-depth articles. I find that when I have a question about something, I read a lot about it to get a better understanding. Those links could all be compiled into a single post (page) that remains on the Internet as a resource for others. It’s also a way for me to bookmark useful information and build upon it myself.
Long ago, I stopped linking to most other blogs because 1) they usually didn’t link back and 2) their posts have a short-term relevance. I’m much more interested in information that changes my life and changes the lives of others, specifically, factual knowledge that makes me and others more rational.
It is in my rational self-interest to live in a world where people are better informed and committed to understanding the basic premise of my rational philosophy which is the Binary Circumstance, that things either exist or they don’t. All knowledge is about things that exist. Knowledge is, in fact, correctly distinguishing between existence and nonexistence. You can’t know anything about things that aren’t there.
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