Splog Filtering
A casual look at the front page over at Weblogs.com will show that the bad guys rule the battlefield currently in the struggle to combat splogs – spam blogs.
Of the first 20 listed on the page (taken around 2:30pm Central on 9/25/05), all but six (#2, #3, #11, #12, #16 and #20) are splogs. So in this small sample 70% of the submitted pings have splogs behind them. We’ve monitored this issue over a period of time and a much broader sampling of data. On the whole, the average number of splog pings is much lower than is reflected here. But this sample does make the point; there’s a lot of noise in the channel already, and it’s growing much faster than the signal.
Splogs are one of the reasons we are getting into the ping server business. We support open infrastructure, so at the lowest level, we will process everyone’s pings, including the splogs. There’s significant demand, however, among aggregators and consumers to provide filtering services that will identify and isolate splogs from the publishing stream. A host of different tools and techniques are being evaluated as a means to quickly and accurately distinguish splogs from “real” blogs. One of the running themes of this blog will be to chronicle our development and service efforts in this area. Eventually, we envision that consumers of our outbound ping stream will be able to configure our output to filter out splogs, given a “splog quotient” threshold, or some other equivalent set of metrics.
Also, if you look at the ads in the right hand side of the picture, note the amazing contextual awareness Google demonstrates in addressing me with their ads. Suck at golf? How’d they know?
