Comments on: Ten Suggestions for Google's Blogspot

By: Blog Police

Blog Police — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 21:25:34 +0000

Someione should take you and beat the fucking shit out of YOU for not having a life!

By: Nathan Larson

Nathan Larson — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 17:33:05 +0000

I think we should have hierarchical labels, similar to how Wikipedia has hierarchical categories. For instance, the labels “cats” and “dogs” could exist in the following hierarchy:

I. Animals
A. Pets
1. Cats
2. Dogs
B. Wild Animals
1. Ostriches
2. Elephants
II. Plants
A. Houseplants
1. Hostas
2. Azaleas
B. Wild plants
1. Dandelions
2. Crabgrass

Actually, Wikipedia has more of a web of categories than a hierarchy. So, for instance, “Elephants” might fall under the categories of both “Animals” and “Wild,” and the category “Wild” could have the subcategories, “Wild animals” and “wild plants.” Play around with Wikipedia’s categories sometime. You’ll see what I mean.

That kind of scheme, if properly implemented, makes it much easier to find what you’re looking for.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 23:07:54 +0000

I like those a lot, someone has just posted this on Blog Party and I think that there is not much hope for blogger unless Google starts taking it seriously. They don't seem to take their blog search engine that seriously either. The results are horriblee and so not Google!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Oct 2005 18:18:21 +0000

i thought you'd be happy to know that your words are being heard at google, most definitely. i'm sitting at the zend/php conference listening to a keynote by adam bosworth, vp of engineering at google, and he made a comment about getting “yelled at about spam in blogs”. ;)

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 02:38:25 +0000

The answer isn't in the blog hosting sites, that's not where the money is. No, it's in the ad content providers. Google Adsense, Yahoo, adbrite, and others are the villians here. They've created a product that is easy to exploit, abuse, and manipulate to make some easy dough. If I were an ad publisher, I'd be very pissed off that someone is allowing this fraud to occur on their network. If Google et al don't start self regulating soon, either gov't will step in or the internet will route around this damage. Their business model will be changed or lost either way.

By: Derek K. Miller

Derek K. Miller — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 19:58:08 +0000

Netcraft has a nice summary article of the splogstorm:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/ 2005/10/17/ google_draws_fire_over_blogspot_spam_blogs.html

By: duzins

duzins — Wed, 19 Oct 2005 06:34:53 +0000

It scares me a little what will happen by this time next year when RSS might be a tad more mainstream with Vista and Office coming out (even if you're not a windows user you have to admit most people are).
Can you just see how it's gonna be for those NOOBs who go to blogger and set up accounts. And, worse, the NOOB slimey peeps who just wanna earn a buck will splog to the third power. If you think these guys are bad, wait til all your neighbors, your dentist and the man who drives the ice cream truck all have blogs.
I sure hope they figure this out soon. An idea:
Why don't we all just pool our money, hire the splogger, then we can all beat him senseless…

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 16:37:55 +0000

None of this will reduce blog SPAM. All that it will do, is remove market share from Google. As such, don't expect them to implement most of it.
-Randy Charles Morin

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 16:37:28 +0000

7 Sounds good to me… Everyone (well, most everyone) likes showing a counter or two or three on their blogs… and then there's that t-shirt…

By: Tack

Tack — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:36:12 +0000

Fair series of comments Chris – and understandably born of both frustration and concern. Unfortunately, this is going to be a problem with ALL “free” blog platforms and I don't really see a universal solution. I guess as long as the cycle is broken SOMEWHERE, the system becomes less attractive to the spammers. What about also implementing spam ID on the directory, search systems – like pubsub , technorati etc? I think it's going to need a multi pronged attack if it is going to be solved. I would agree absolutely that we must act NOW.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 08:41:07 +0000

Chris, I have mixed feelings about your ideas. 1. Employ a blog spammer Not sure how realistic this item is, but it sure gave me a chuckle. :) 2. Probationary Period. Limiting accounts in the way you've suggested doesn't seem realistic. How would Google limit this? E-mail addresses are infinite. Cookies are easily ditched. This item, IMHO, would only negatively impact honest users, not sploggers. Also, your idea of no-follow is, IMHO, completely useless. I believe that most sploggers are creating splogs not for PR, but rather for AdSense earning. 3. Sponsor a Blogger. Agreed. I've already suggested this in my own Blogspot Anti-splogging Solutions post. 4. New banner button. I don't think the "report a splogger" tactic is very useful over the long haul. At present, sploggers can create new splogs faster than people can flag 'em and Google can investigate. 5. Take every experience seriously. 6. Cross reference your databases. 7. Reward flaggers. Duh, sure, and n/a :) 8. Audit randomly. If the sample is modest, the usefulness is minimal. If the sample is large and frequent, the disturbence is substantial. Not a good idea. 9. Flag "hot" keywords. Might be somewhat useful. By forcing sploggers to obfuscate keywords, their AdSense revenues would undoubtedly suffer at least a little. 10. No more dashes. Attacking minor things, not root issues causes and causes isn't worth it. * * * My own list, summarized from my post: 1) Charge $1 to establish an *indexed* blogspot account. Still give away free (non-initially-indexed) accounts. As an alternate option, offer free upgrades via mobile-text-message (a la Gmail) 2) Do invites (blogger invite a blogger) 3) Automatically or, upon request, offer to index any free blog that's met a certain threshold (minimum posts, minimum time alive, etc.) This'd allow people without credit cards, without a cell phone, without friends on Blogger, etc. to still get their content eventually indexed. All of this would be a major pain for Google, likely, and a minor pain for honest bloggers... but I think as a comprehensive plan it'd kill 99% of splogs.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 07:16:14 +0000

Awesome – I'm especially fond of anything that involves giving away t-shirts (and rewarding the flagging of spam blogs).
We have definitely been learning lessons (and, in fact, working directly with) our fellow Googlers who have been fighting spam for quite some time. The ideas about cross-referencing, hot words and sharing tools are ones we are already implementing.
For what it's worth, we're seeing that the spammers are serially creating individual accounts in order to create their blogs … it's not multiple blogs under a single account.
Thanks for all the ideas.
Jason Goldman

By: Mollyfud

Mollyfud — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 02:33:52 +0000

Not sure about the dashes one unless they implement catergories. I uses dashes in some of my blogspot blogs as I am trying to fake catergories (badly mind you). Example: Main blog: mollyzine.blogspot.com Podcasting Catergory/Blog: mollyzine-podcasting.blogspot.com HTH Molly

By: agents don't do housework

agents don't do housework — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

to me from where, and why. I dunno, it's a habit I aquired long ago when I ran an unsuccessful dot-com back in the boom days (boom? more like bust). Anywho, sblogs (or, to the somewhat less initiated, spam blogs) have been around for a while, and as Chris Pirillo pointed out, Blogspot is notorious for attracting these creatures of the blight. Ah, yes, the sblog roams free at Blogspot. Not that Google isn't interested in doing something about it - let's face it, they have to pay for all that idiotic bandwidth