Everyone wants to make a quick buck online, unfortunately the trend at the moment seems to revolve around not doing any work to actually make the dollars. If email spam wasn’t enough, now dirty dirty spammers have taken to producing splogs, or spam blogs.
The basic idea behind a splog is to generate lots and lots of content, throw on some sort of advertising – maybe Google Adsense and hopefully watch the money come in. Of course, since spammers are bottom feeding filth, it is far too much effort for them to produce the content they want to whore for a dollar themselves. The clear and obvious solution is to rip off other internet users content and republish it as their own, simply to produce content on their site and an opportunity for someone to click a piece of advertising.
My problem with splogs, is that the owners are aggregating and/or republishing other peoples work to make money for nothing. Reporting on the happenings online and around the world is fine, if you’re adding your own point of view and it’s in your own words; ripping someone else’s work is just plain rude.
Typically, if someones content is being republished without notification/permission and it’s attributed properly – most content authors don’t have a problem with it. Since sploggers are bottom feeders, not only do they not ask permission – they generally don’t provide a link back to the original content. It isn’t fair to tar all bottom feeding sploggers with the same brush, some do take the time to attribute the content, which is less of a slap in the face.
Personally, I’d prefer it if they’d write their own unique content; however in the absence of that I guess for the moment we’ll have to graciously accept the odd inbound link from the ‘nice’ spammers.
This evening I received a notification via