Ok, I chuckled and clicked through on this obviously photoshopped blogad from simplydumb.com:

Former king of pop Michael Jackson’s ex-wife Debbie Rowe has revealed to an Irish newspaper that he is not the father of their children Prince Michael Jr and Paris.

Jacko with boobs, spooky!

Once at Simply Dumb, I looked around a bit and found it to be one of the B5media network blogs about weird and unusual stories where primarily snipped news articles are classified as “simply dumb” or “simply simply dumb” or various other categories. Duncan Riley is credited as the writer on the sidebar although most bylines I saw were using “admin.” I already subscribe to a couple weird, unusual, bizarre RSS feeds so I decided to dig deeper on this one.

As far as frequency of updates, it looks to be updated about once per day on average, by going back over the last month’s worth of blog posts (although the last set of updates were on the 8th and here it is the 12th). Partial text RSS feed. I didn’t care for the design, which is a black background with tiny slice of yellow across the top (what for?) and JavaScript errors in IE. Loaded fine in Firefox and Opera. Love or hate IE, you still have to make sure your blog works without errors in it unless it’s a competing browser only blog maybe. Numerous ads being deployed: Adsense, Adbrite, Chitika, etc, not a real clean reader experience when the content is primarily not original.

End result? Their advertisement on another blog through blogads sucked me in (good job), site content lacked much in the way of editorial and seemed more like simply splog (check the permalink above and see that it was entirely pulled from Webindia), left after a couple minutes, didn’t subscribe.

Wasted time, wasted opportunity, wasted ad, wasted money. The best part was the photoshopped pic which is thumbed above, and even that was a quick PS hack job if you clickthru and see the full-sized original.

Blogs like Simply Dumb continue to reinforce my belief that most of these blog network owners are more concerned about generating a sheer number of blogs — even when they suck like this spam weblog from a competing blog network that recently sold in the network package to AOL for millions of dollars — to bolster their numbers and attract advertisers ($$ ad revenue $$) as opposed to actually creating worthwhile content.

Wanna start a good blog network? Then don’t add new blogs just to increase the numbers, add new blogs with dedicated, passionate bloggers on the topic. Splogs primarily consist of content from other places.

I really have to wonder how search engines like Google will treat networks using obvious tactics like these over time? Will they penalize the good sites on the network? This is another reason I’m about as likely to join a network as urinate on an electric fence.

Hopefully worthwhile content won’t be subverted by these type blogs but it’s already happening. It seems to have worked against CNET’s editors who spotlighted the above mentioned WIN spam weblog as one of the top 100 tech blogs on the web and skipped other blogs that deal regularly with spam like Aunty-spam (no affiliation).

Did this post make you go hmm?

 Loading ...

• Comment spam DNA icon art
• Over 90% of blog comments are spam, reports Akismet
• Google swings Page Rank sword at blog networks and link sellers who pass PR
• Gawker launches Sillicon Valley gossip rag: Valleywag
• Blog comment spam and SE impact: is it that significant?
• MSN Spaces 101+ million blog visits and becoming social network blog hybrid?