Nathan Weinberg over at InsideGoogle is wondering if WeblogsInc is gaming Technorati, Blogpulse and others by using their automated weekly Best Of script to pound out their network wide automated messages:

This is something all the blog search engines need to work around, or that Weblogs needs to stop doing until they do. It is wrong to congratulate yourself on having your blogs in high positions on link-based lists when many of those links are self generated. Its that gray area between link spam and editorial linking that this falls into, and I’d like to think the folks at Weblogs Inc are honest enough to clean this up. We’ll see.

I think this is more a problem of programming than anything dishonest or unethical. WIN should have their program only post to their active blogs and it might be better to post relevant or semi-relevant content Best Of posts. This presents some technical challenges, however if every post was tagged (and it seems to me they all are) then it would be possible to only post the Best Of relevant posts to their respective network blogs or the more dead ones. That would actually be a more valuable service to readers, too.

Now take a look at the WIN Spam Blog: spam.weblogsc.inc. It’s so bad I’m not even going to link to it. Sorry, readers will have to copy/paste if they are that curious. Jason/Brian, now that you guys are AOL flush, maybe you should pay a few folks to aggregate spam-related blog news into that abortion, find some key writers, or shut it down. In WIN’s defense, they are actively, eagerly searching for writers. This smells like a good potential opportunity.

CNET was so enthralled by this blog that they made it one of their top 100 tech blogs on the web. Too bad CNET hadn’t seen the Hmm spam category.

Jason, how much will you pay me to write about the Best Of the Best Of WIN auto posted blog entries?

I didn’t discover this CNET mistake, BTW, it was pointed out by one of the wise CNET readers. This is a great example of why I like comments and don’t feel that all commenters should be treated like second class citizens. The comments on the CNET top 100 list are much more interesting than WIN’s spam blog and many of those posts are people themselves pitching their own blogs. InsideGoogle isn’t on the list either, BTW.

It also makes the folks at CNET putting this on the list suspect. Like how did this WIN spam blog get there? I have a guess why: they needed to have a category that covered the spam problem and nobody inhouse followed any blogs about the spam problem so they went to the popular network, WIN, and assumed that theirs just had to be one of the best. I mean, really, these are the same folks behind Engadget. Of course publishers are not immune from dogs. Not me, not WIN, not even Stephen King (Maximum Overdrive, anyone?)

That’s the only logical reason I can see for the WIN Spam Blog being in their list. Only the CNET editors who compiled the list will ever know the truth, but I hope the next version removes that in favor of other, better choices, or by that time WIN hires some writers on this subject to raise that from the dead.

I digress.

Again, I don’t think WIN is doing anything unethical or intentionally deceptive by running our their Best Of automated script posting across the network. They are just cross marketing their properties across their network. It should be Technorati, Blogpulse, etc that filter out these weekly Best Of posts and I see that Dave Sifry is already commenting in the InsideGoogle thread and appreciated the head’s up.

It didn’t take long for me to filter out these posts on my own server-based aggregator. Like one line of code, actually.

Update 2:10 PST: Jason Calacanis “just got off a plane” and stops by InsideGoogle in the comments section to set the record straight:

… It is not to game the system it is to promote our blogs. I think it is fair to say that a) people know this, b) search eng. Know it, and c) it is not a big deal. If it was automated that would be kinda wrong I agree.

Actually, I think if it isn’t at least partially automated it would be “kinda wrong.” Who wants to manually copy the same post to 50+ blogs each week? Yeah, the post text might be assembled by a human each week but I find it hard to believe that a human being is going on a copy/pasting mission once a week.

I’ve struckthru any mention of automated posting above, since Jason says it is being done by a human and I have no proof otherwise (even though it doesn’t make complete sense). Jason said he’s going to write up a post more fully explaining how this works later tonight.

Wonder if that will make next week’s Best Of list? Oh, the irony.

Did this post make you go hmm?

Maybe Related Posts (plugin generated)

• Calacanis has Dear Abby aspirations
• Thank you CNET for making Hmm part of your Blog 100
• Google swings Page Rank sword at blog networks and link sellers who pass PR
• Hmm Interview #2: Jeremy Wright from B5 Media
• RSS Sunday subscription cleanup
• Engadget expanding, adding labs starting Oct 15