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| Monday, August 28, 2006 |
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Yo, Verizon! 
Chemo for splogs
| | Since then I've been paying more attention to the surge of postings in spam blogs (or splogs — blogs that exist only to scam money from click flow through AdSense or similar systems) of stuff I've written for purposes other than providing fodder for scammers. |
| | Check out the latest, in Klippert.com. What is that? It's fancier than first-generation splogs, which were easy to spot, with their oddball names and Blogger or Wordpress default themes. This one looks a bit more legitimate, yet it still has that robotic ulterior-motive look to it. That's because it clearly exists for a single reason: to make money off AdSense ads, using content produced elsewhere as bait. |
| | By the way, I don't think AdSense is the monoculture here. Instead, I think the monoculture is AdSense-type advertising (a category of online advertising whose proper label I don't yet know, and may not yet exist). AdSense may be the largest habitat within this monoculture; but it's not the whole thing. (Even Ian's blog has ads from Amazon as well as AdSense.) |
| | The bigger problem is that we all to some degree live in the monoculture of online advertising; and we contribute to it, whether we like it or not. Either through our tolerance of it, or by unwillingly contributing to it. |
| | And I think it's time we stopped both. |
| | Because splogs are a cancer in the advertising monoculture. And we need to come up with new forms of treatment. Ones that don't just come from Google and Yahoo. Ones that come from us. |
| | So I've decided to do something small but possibly helpful, toward what I hope will be a widespread manners-enforcement campaign against spam blogs, splogs, adblogs, or whatever we want to call them. |
| | I am using a new Creative Commons license. |
| | Until now I have dedicated everything here to the public domain, because I've always believed that's where creative work should go anyway, once it's outlived its immediate and legitimate purposes. |
| | I am now using the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license. I don't think it's a perfect fit — not by a long shot. But it comes closest (far as I know) to expressing my intention: that what I write here can be used by anybody for any purpose other than only using it to attract advertising. |
| | Because I believe legitimate blogs don't do that. And splogs do. |
Calm before the... what?
| | To get the official word, I emailed some of the people I know at Yahoo News to ask, 'What happened to the blog results in Yahoo News?" Despite the fact that today is a Sunday, Brian Nelson, a Yahoo spokesperson, called me back to say the Blogs beta had been "temporarily taken offline to retool the offering." |
| | In an email sent a short while later, he added, "Maybe this goes without saying, (but) blog content remains an important part of our overall news and news search strategy. It¹s worth mentioning again because I¹ve read speculation in the blogosphere about what Y! might be thinking bigger picture when it comes to blog content." |
Owdoors
| | Didn't blog yesterday because the kid and I went on a kayak trip around the harbor here in Santa Barbara. Wish I'd brought a camera along, but the kid — who has been sailing in summer camp and is more experienced than I in the kayak dept — told me it would get soaked. He was right. |
| | When we rented the kayak, I also bought a tube of sunscreen, which I forgot, along with my hat, in the bag of stuff we left in safe keeping at the rental place. This wasn't a problem as long as it was still foggy down there. But then the fog burned off, and so did my skin. |
| | Well, not quite off, but my face, arms and legs are all a delicate pink this morning. |
| | The night before we had fun going up to Lizard's Mouth, a fun easy-hike rock feature on the Santa Ynez ridge overlooking Santa Barbara. That was before a Star-b-que with the Santa Barbara Astronomical Unit, our local (and very active) astronomy club. Great time. |
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