A good post from Steve ‘Micro Persuasion’ Rubel about an article in the latest issue of Wired magazine about the meteoric rise of Spam Blogs or Splogs and how they may come to threaten the blogosphere as we know it.
Steve comments that the article’s author (Charles C. Mann) misses out on taking to task the people and networks who fund Splogs ie. advertising networks, publishers and so on down the chain.
I’m no expert but it sems to me as if we have another unwanted by-product of the growth of online networks and the rush to commodify the benefits this brings.
Should there be some form of legislation implemented to tackle the problem? Of course there should. The article points out that 56% of active English-language blogs are spam according to researchers at the University of Maryland.
The problem is: with disintemediated and global audiences, who will take overall responsbility for overseeing the clean-up?
Steve draws an analogy with terrorism and says we need to hit the financiers who fund Splogs. I suppose I agree, but to risk taking the terrorism analogy further: policing Splogs may not be too far in practice from the fight against global terrorism – with the obvious major differences! Vast resources and joined up behaviour are needed to tackle both problems. But it is far from an easy task.
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