Splogbomb Sends Bloggers Sniffing

Something's rotten in the Blogosphere and it's not completely clear where the stench originates, or whose effluence is compounding the matter. After the recent Blogger splogbomb, the chorus can't agree on whether the smeller's the feller or if the denier's the supplier. The saga began over the weekend while most of us on the West side (hemispherically) were immersed in beer in and football, tattered boxers upsetting the missus. Some "resourceful little bastard" dropped an automated keyword spam blog generator RSS sucker thing (afterwards to be known as the splog-bomb), taking advantage of the names of popular bloggers, like Dave Winer, Tim Bray, and Dan Gillmor, as key search terms. weblog. Blogger's Jason Goldman posted a long address to the blog community, vowing to approach the problem, but never really intimated exactly how that would happen. Goldman suggests that Blog*Spot can "improve the quality of the Recently Updated information" they publish, and "make it more difficult for suspected spammers to create content." They've also created an Fighting Splog weblog, who has selflessly devoted himself to reporting the splog scourge. Regularly updated with announcements like (da-da-da) "697 Splogs Deleted," and "2529 Splogs Deleted" (that is to be read with hands on hips and deep sustained booming voice), SplogFighter says a list of deleted subdomains isn't really proof of action. "I think it's long overdue for some real actions on the part of Google to do something. It's pretty clear the Flag as Objectionable button doesn't work and it has failed miserably. Depending on time of day there is just as many splogs in Next Blog ring as before flagging was implemented," writes SplogFighter. Technorati's David Siffry was quick to join the conversation on Monday as well, but unlike Blogger detractors, said the splog bomb episode has been exaggerated. "[W]e've experienced much worse spam attacks in the past. The key difference in the spam attack over the weekend is that the attackers' posts included many popular search terms including popular bloggers' names - which is a common ego search on engines like Technorati. This made this particular attack much more visible to a number of high profile bloggers than attacks in the past," writes PubSub and other search engines have been clogged up with splogs, a similar ego search on Google's