Splogs run amok
Threadwatch had an article with lots of interesting links to stories on the amount of static vs information in feed subscriptions these days.
Some well known bloggers are complaining that their vanity searches are overrun with splogs.
So I thought I’d try and see if the splogs have picked up my little name yet. And I was surprised to see what at first looked fairly legit. But the juxtaposition of my name, a sentence from my blog and a sentence from somewhere else, including a weird link, leads me to suspect foul. In fact, those links on that blog (dare I say splog?) reminds me of that URL within URL experiment I covered a while ago. And if you go further back into the past posts, you’ll find all the links ping the same net neighborhood… Around 70.86.78.22…
Someone said that they didn’t understand the point of the splogs. What’s the payoff? Probably Adsense for many, I’d say. But someone (I don’t remember where) suggested the splogs could be a delivery mechanism for malware. I hope it isn’t possible, but think about the IE bug that makes IE execute code found in iframes… I saw that when I did iframes a while ago. It was unintentional on my part, but it can certainly be used for ugly stuff. Hopefully it doesn’t work on feeds…
It is hard to tell the main purpose for splogs. To begin with they seemed just another attempt at PageRank, but ad revenue is likely a major draw. I doubt we can really conclude either is more important to spammers. Maybe the whole point of splogs is that they can easily do both jobs.
I had not heard about the malware angle, but I am sure it is possible and probably being used by some spammer. They could also be used for normal spyware/adware too. Rather than trying to take over the machine they may just be another way to display ads or gather tracking info they can sell to someone.
Our wiki page on splogs:
http://wiki.chongqed.org//Splog