Mark Cuban and company at IceRocket are miffed by the ever increasing number of spam blogs aka splogs. Cuban defines splogs:

Whats a splog ? A splog is any blog whose creator doesnt add any written value. Im sure some might argue that packaging data , such as news feeds or the blog posts of others is added value. I dont think it is. After all, thats why there are topics and indexes.

Cuban calls blogspot-bassed blogs “by far the worst offender” and says they are “killing off thousands every day.” Interestingly, he also cites .info blogs as being a high percentage of splogs. Unfortunately, as with any sort of spam filtering, false positives are occuring and innocent, non-spammy blogs are being caught in the combines.

Unlike Technorati, IceRocket’s tagging structure doesn’t require a link back to them — it can link to anywhere — which makes tagging posts very cool. I’ve done this a few times here and linked to the MakeYouGoHmm search for the tagged keyword. IceRocket also grabs the category and makes them tags as well, so this post will show up under the tag ’spam.’

So, what if your blog is hosted on a blogspot based blog? Cuban leaves clues to IceRocket’s future plans:

If you are an individual blogger whose blog is hosted on blogspot.com, every day the chances of you being excluded from icerocket.com’s, and other search engines’ indexes increases.

I think it’s a pretty smart marketing move for Cuban threating to pull all blogspot-based blogs from IceRocket. Though I doubt he’d ever follow through on the threat, it has caused a ton of people to talk about IceRocket again, which is what the engine needs. The last time I heard about them was when the rumour was they were changing their name to blogscour, which turned out to be misreported.

The most likely IceRocket scenario,IMO is the spam filters are cranked up for .info and blogspot-based blogs, which who can blame them for taking out the trash? This is yet another reason not to use third-party hosting for a blog. If too many users violate basic netiquetter, these kinds of things happen.

• gada.be spammed by blogspot splogs
• How to add a link to another site with a blogspot / blogger hosted blog
• First detailed look at Sphere beta
• IceRocket to be relaunched as Blogscour
• Google makes it easier to add Adsense to Blogger
• Cuban’s IceRocket adds blog search