Here comes Blog Spam

IF a computer can do it
AND someone can make money from it
AND they can do it anonymously
THEN it's pretty clear it's going to happen, even if it ruins a good thing for the rest of us.

Blog growth is accelerating. It's now doubling every five months or so, with 30,000 new blogs coming every single day.

Except that's not really good news, because a whole bunch of those blogs are being created with computers automated to spew out countless brainless blogs.

Here's how it works: you create a program that develops hundreds or even thousands of blogs, all of which are busy referring to each other and to your products. Soon, you start showing up on automated services like google or technorati. You get more than your fair share of traffic.

Hey, it's not against the law.

But yeah, it's selfish and it denigrates a valuable resource that the rest of us depend on.

One more time, I'll say it clearly: anonymity is bad for the net. Wouldn't you like a switch that would prevent all anonymous email from showing up in your inbox? Or a similar switch in google, which would filter out anonymous trash sites? The Wikipedia would work even better if all its contributors were maskless.

Link: Seth's Blog: The problem with anonymous (part VII).

Link: Fast Company | Change Agent -- Issue 51.

Thanks to David Sifry for working so hard on the spam issue and for the incredible service technorati performs. Check out his blog for more on the rapid creation of new blogs: Sifry's Alerts.