Splogs cluttering the blogosphere and the web.

von | Okt 23, 2005 | Blog, Digital News, SEO / SEA

First, Google did great things in helping everyone find relevant information on the web. Now it is one of those helping to add clutter. The blog-provider blogger.com, acquired by Google some time ago, is one of those blogservices enabling splogs. Within the across the Sound Podcast, Steve Rubel also mentions this upcoming problem. There is a couple of stories about this, here, here and here.

The move was designed to doctor search results and boost traffic to those sites by fooling the search-engine spiders that crawl the Web looking for commonly linked-to destinations.

Email spam is bad, as it clogs up user’s email box and make it difficult for marketers to send even permission based emails, as these might not be opened either.

Splogs don’t affect users directly (apart from those subscribed to certain RSS feeds). But it can have a large negative impact on the blogosphere (and consumer generated media, as Steve puts it), as well as information access. As the quote above says, it’s about fooling searchengines and hence distorting searchengine results in the favour of the splogged (ie linked to) websites.
If a bot creates a couple of fake blogs all linking to a site for, say, Viagra, tagged with „pharmaceutical“ and other tags, then this will have a high position within a search for pharmaceuticals. Even though the user will (probably) have searched for more objective information.

Technorati writes, that 2% – 8% of new weblogs are fake or spam weblogs.

So this might indeed have a direct impact for users. If good information cannot be found as easily any more because of bad information, because the search results show too many splogged sites, then the whole concept of the web as a medium for quickly finding relevant information is in danger.

So what can be done?
First option: filter blogs from search results. But this is not really what the search engines will want (remember Yahoo! integrating blogs into news search results). This would kill most consumer generated media and put the web back to where it was 5 years ago. Not to mention of the loss of valuable information that quite a few bloggers provide!
second option: make it impossible for the bots to open blogs automatically. There must be a technical solution for this, Google!!

btw, Fightsplog wants to take action, so go there an help (if you can).

Talking about consumer generated media

von | Okt 11, 2005 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital Marketing

PSFK again points me to something. Which is, in a way, really groundbreaking.
MTV let’s users create their own MTV channel. Including their own clips and content. Now that’s real consumer generated media. This time push-broadcasted to everyone (since it is a TV channel).

„With today’s announcement, we are handing over an entire channel online
to college students and everyone who wants new music,“ said Stephen Friedman,
GM, mtvU. „mtvU Uber gives them the power to create and program their own
channel, and will remain in perpetual beta mode as they experiment and pioneer
the digital future.“

Just wonder if the advertising will reflect that? Will they show only ads produced by the consumers, like they have at Converse?

Making meta (mobile) search more convenient: Gada.Be

von | Okt 11, 2005 | Blog, Digital Culture, Digital News, SEO / SEA

Sean, (whom I don’t know personally, but happens to a friend of a friend of mine (Ace)) pointed to the fact that a cool meta search engine is live: gada.be

Most notable benefits:
– since you enter the search terms as part of the URL, you can bookmark regular search items (if you regular search for a certain word, you can bookmark http://word.gada.be)
– as the search term is part of the URL, it is much more convenient when entering the URL through a mobile phone.
– it’s a meta search. So it returns results from Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. all at once.

(More infos here, here and here.)

And of course (and not least), the blog post of the originator of all this.

Open Source Marketing

von | Okt 11, 2005 | Blog

Open Source Marketing has been a topic in the latest „Across the sound“ Podcast of Rubel and Jaffe. With the first ever guest being Dave Chase, who already wrote some posts about open source marketing.

I still think, after this discussion with Martin Oetting [DE] and James Cherkoff, that there should be a differentiation between open source marketing and open source advertising.

Open source marketing is about how much will you let your target audience take part in the typical PPPPs. (See Blowfly.com)
Open source advertising is just about the fact how much you will let your audience participate in the one P – Promotion – of your product. (See Converse)