Due to the popularity of blogs, people will always find ways to abuse it. Blogs are undeniably a powerful tool for publishing, but if there are into the wrong hands, it can cause search engines mayhem or difficult finding keywords. Splogs or in other words are basically blogs which are published by people or mostly computer bots that will publish information that are stolen from others or publish contents which are scrapes for one particular site. These are also called fake blogs. (Mills 2005) These Sblogs or fake blogs can cause various problems like, wasting time if you ever come across one or just wasting resources of blog hosts.
Above: An example of a splog (source: google.com)
Therefore, many blog hosts websites team have been going through a knock down process to eliminate all this resource consuming spam blogs. An article by Micheal Pollit, tells many staff of blog hosting companies have downed almost 25,000 splogs since late August 2005. (Pollit 2005) This is already a growing disaster, almost 8% of 75,000 blogs everybody are classified as fake. (Pollit 2005) How this does relates to document design and publishing? Well, spam blog not only drives plagiarism by taking materials from other sites without acknowledging the respectful owners, it also alters the information too. So ethically, it is very wrong, publishing speaking. Regardless of what type of blog is it, it also does not follow the theory that users only read and find keywords. (Kress & Leeuwen 2006) Instead spam blog , consist of many unnecessary information that will annoy web surfers.
As a result, many weblog hosting companies did various of prevention methods to curb this disaster. For example, Blogger implemented word verification process that only can be completed by humans during the creation of blog process. Build in softwares such as Support Vectors Machines are introduced in the market to curb this disaster as well. (Kolari, Finin, & Joshi 2006) Nevertheless, I personally think this spam blog disaster can never really be fully eradicated, people would still find a way to counter this software.
References List
Kress, G. & van Leeuwen, T. 2006, Reading Images, “Chapter 6: The meaning of composition”, Routledge, New York, pp. 175-214.
Kolari P, Finin T & Joshi A (2006) ‘SVMs for blogsphere: Blog identification and Splog Detection’ viewd on 6th June 2008 at http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/paper/html/id/269/
Mills E, (2005) ‘Tempted by blogs, spam becomes ‘splog’ Viewed on 6th June 2008 at http://news.cnet.com/Tempted-by-blogs,-spam-becomes-splog/2100-1032_3-5903409.html?tag=nl.caro
Pollit, M (2005) ‘Inside IT: Cashing in on fake blogs’ Viewed at 6th June at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/nov/17/newmedia.media
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