Chris Pirillo rants on the huge infestation of splogs, or spam blogs, using Google’s blogspot.com free blog hosting service and how they are degrading his new gada.be service [first Hmm look here]:

Google, it may have been a smart acquisition in the beginning, but y’all need to clean house in a big way. You’re the tallest nail, and you’re really getting pounded - and now others, who aren’t even using your service, are getting pounded. Blogspot has become nothing but a crapfarm, and your brand is going to go down with it. If your motto truly is to do no evil, then you need to start putting some resources behind an effort to curb this train wreck.

Pirillo’s suggestion is to add some sort of CAPTCHA system to the posting interface but that would cause problems on a number of fronts. An image based CAPTCHA has flaws, particularly for disabled users, although something could be done with text to speech perhaps, reading back the CAPTCHA to sight-impaired users. As for the blogging desktop clients, that’s a whole other technical issue. Chris admits he isn’t a technical guy, so I’m sure he would be happy with Google implementing some other type of client/server handshake.

The problem isn’t in the authentication though, because there is still a user/password situation, it’s the ease by which almost anybody can sign up for a free blogspot account.

It’s the whole flawed free blog hosting model. It isn’t really free to those who run the service. There are bandwidth expenses, program updates and bug fixes and the all importan policing of bad account holders; those who seek to setup blogs which violate the terms of service.

What Google needs to do is create a system for automated pinging of spam complaints and resolution. Once these accounts are flagged, the status of the blog could be sandboxed until it could be investigated and possibly removed. Something like this could help flag these bad accounts and I’m sure they’d notice a pattern of where/who is setting up these accounts and hold some of them over for human/manual approval. This will cut many of these blog post spammers using blogspot off at the knees because they can’t setup shop and go nuts spamming before Google has a chance to do anything.

The way it is today, they don’t care though if they are shut down because they’ll just open another splog at blogspot — or some other free hosted blog service — and start the viscious cycle of abuse again.

I’ve been instrumental in getting an MSN Spaces account removed that was using illegal content and spamming. It is possible to get rid of these accounts, but it requires too much work by the wrong people (legitimate webmasters) — that’s the huge problem with free blog hosting services.

Free hosting anything for that matter. It’s not just a Google problem. It’s a web -wide free hosting problem in that some of those who don’t pay for something see that as a prime opportunity to abuse others. Heck, some of those who do pay for hosting still see spamming as the way to go.

Bloggers who pay for their blog hosting, though, are going to be less likely to spam in general because it puts their domains and accounts at risk. It also puts them in the crosshairs for prosecution should there ever be any definitive spam laws. These free-hosted blog services have their days numbered if they don’t police their users activity better.

Remember Mark Cuban complaining about the same thing with IceRocket last month? IceRocket icing blogger and .info splogs. I guess Pirillo’s tech guys didn’t fully see this one coming?

Pirillo mentions that they can’t cut off blogspot completely because of the 1% of the legitimate blogspot users. It’s a very real problem and I’m totally with him on this one, Google needs to get their act together and police blogspot better or [gasp] shut it down.

Yes, shut it down should be one of those possible options.

And as I say that, with all seriousness, we have a legitimate blogspot hosted blog on the topic: Gmail Talk, so I’d have to move that to one of our own domains. I wouldn’t mind doing that if the end result was a huge eradication of splogs (they just pollute the entire blog space and hurt all bloggers). I use blogger to post to another blog on my own domain, so it’s not the end of the world if that becomes Google’s ultimate solution. I believe the inconvenience would be high to those 1% that Pirillo mentions, but it would be the only guaranteed quick fix to stop the splogs.

I doubt Google will shut down blogspot though because they just added the ability to add Adsense to blogspot blogs. Instead, hopefully they’ll hear people complaining about the degenerate blogspot sploggers.

Then again it seems kind of ironic to me that gada.be is being spammed because one of the things I don’t care for about the service is how it runs Adsense next to only keyword gathered content. So you’ll have gada.be returning results filled with splogs and the gada.be team makes money from these aggregated results via Adsense revenue. And guess who else makes money from that deal?

Google.

I do realize these mashup services need to make money somehow, but this real world example is just more of the dark side of mashups that build their entire model on third parties for data. They aren’t a search engine, so please don’t anybody make that comparison. Search engines send out spiders to sources directly. They aren’t ping receptors either like Technorati or Feedster or Weblogs. Yeah, gada.be provides a service by sending traffic to the source, but they are more parasitic in nature than search engines and ping receptors who get their data directly from the source.

It’s for these reasons, and others, that I question the longevity of these new mashup services because they are all too reliant on data from other sources, most of which can be all too easily manipulated by splogs, as evidenced here. So you have third party services filtering original data and now the third party (the mashup provider) of the ping receptor or search engine (like Technorati or Yahoo via their API) needing to filter the data.

Yikes.

Guess the gada.be coders will be writing their own spam filters for blogspot and other free blog hosting services. This is not a trivial technical issue, beyond the splog sources pulling the plug.

And boy would that be unpopular.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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