Sunday, October 16, 2005

Splogs (spam blogs) infest the web

Once blogs became searchable, it was inevitable that spam blogs would emerge. Now they're showing exponential growth.

These are computer generated blogs; the structured nature of a blog, and the RSS interfaces, make it trivial to create software that constructs new blogs from bits and pieces of original work. Spam blogs are to real blogs as some blogs are to OpEd pages -- merely amplifiers. They are relatives of web pages that parasitize and repackage Amazon postings and sales. I expect the best of them will fool many readers, and may even be interesting in a random sort of way.

I knew this was coming because a young coder friend of mine is drawn to the dark side, and he told me he'd done some work in this area. Sigh. I do hope he finds a better outlet for his talents.

Again I wonder how the anti-Darwinists can make any sense of a world where evolution occurs in human timeframes.

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