The RSS Blog

Last October and January, I wrote pieces on the state of the splogosphere, that is the ability of our blog infrastructure to handle SPAM, SPAM blogs, blog comment SPAM and spings. In these pieces, I talked mostly about the splog problem that was rooted in Google's Blogspot hosting service and the inability of blog search engines to filter the splogging noise.

Here we are six months later and nothing much has changed. Splogs are still everywhere and the search engines are struggling with result pages that are littered with splogs. Let's examine a few blogosphere search engines and score the amount of splog found compared to useful results. Let's compare search results for my primary domain; kbcafe.com.

• Bloglines uses subscription information to easily weed out the splogs. Unfortunately, it suffers from a second problem. The results do contain a lot of other search feeds, but at least they don't have a problem with splogs.
• Bloglines Citations is simply broken, although I don't get any splog, the results are usually non-existent or 100% false positives.
• PubSub is also broken. It currently reports only two referrers and going back thru time, whenever it reports more than a handful of referrers, it's mostly splogs. PubSub is completely dominated by splogs.
• Technorati has a lot of problems. They seem to have rid themselves of Blogspot splog, but they now contain a lot of Wordpress splog.
• IceRocket has struggled of late. A few months ago, splog was almost non-existent on IceRocket, but that was likely due to the fact that IceRocket banned new Blogspot blogs from their index. Now, like the other blog search engines, they are struggling with the occasional Wordpress splog.
• BlogPulse is likely the best search engine at filtering splog for the moment. Unlike Blogslines which isn't really that useful, BlogPulse is reporting a lot of referrers, yet I struggled to find any splog. I finally found a splog on the 5th page of the BlogPulse search result pages.
• Google Blog Search like BlogPulse does a very good job of filtering out splogs.
• Feedster was mostly rewritten lately and it would seem they took a rather large step backwards. At this point, it's reporting more splogs than non-splogs.
• Blogdigger doesn't report many results at all and none of it is splogs. Also broken.

Currently, I'm using a combination of BlogPulse, IceRocket and Google blog search. All three do a good job of filtering splogs and still report a lot of new referrers.

One things that has changed is the preferred splogging framework. Six months ago, almost every splog was found on Blogspot, but thanks to a lot of effort on Google's part, this is no longer true. Sploggers prefer the self hosted Wordpress platform. Don't get me wrong, there's still lots of splogs on Blogspot, but the search engines and Google have teamed to reduce the number of those splogs that are appearing in the blog search result pages.

There's a new evil in the blogosphere and that's blog comment SPAM. The amount of blog comment SPAM is not only increasing, but the spammers are writing relevant comments that are less likely to get removed by the blog's author. Some blogging platforms are simply inadequate at stopping blog comment spam. I have a Blogspirit test blog and if you check the right sidebar, the comments are dominated by blog comment spam and I really have no idea how to stop this. I've even tried to disable comments, but the software seems to be broken in this regard.

Another new evil in the blogosphere is spings. Spings are blogosphere pings on behalf of splogs (or fake blogs). The end user doesn't really see this problem, but search engines like Technorati do. David Sifry is reporting that the majority of blogosphere pings are actually spings.

Conclusion? We're not getting anywhere. Splogs are devaluing the blogosphere, as much as email SPAM is devaluing email. The problem is that governments move at a slower speed than the Internet. A spammer or splogger is a millionaire before the authorities know how to deal with them. The solution must come from the private sector.