Your Inbox clogger-spam-has reinvented itself for the world of blogs, in
a phenomenon experts have dubbed 'splog'. Google for now is feeling the
heat. In October, the search giant's Blogger blog-creation tool and BlogSpot
hosting service fell victim to the biggest splog attack yet-an assault that
led to clogged RSS (really simple syndication) readers and overflowing inboxes.
The attacker, or splogger, used automated tools to manipulate the
Blogger-BlogSpot service and create thousands of fake blogs loaded with links to
specific web sites (home mortgage, poker, and tobacco sites among them). 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. Unlike e-mail programs, blogging services don't have the
capability to easily detect and filter out spam, said Bob Wyman, Chief
Technology Officer at blog search and tracking service PubSub.
Google's Jason Goldman, product manager for Blogger, said Google has been
working to address the splog problem for a while, instituting precautions such
as allowing users to flag suspicious blogs as potential fakes and prompting blog
creators to manually transcribe distorted words to verify that the blog was
created by a human and not a machine.
And, he said, Google is not alone in being attacked. "Weblogs in general
are having a problem with spam right now, not just Blogger," he said.
"While it is a problem, it is certainly not the majority case on BlogSpot,
at all."
Source: www.news.com