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Howard Kaushansky -- Umbria -- 'Marketer, Beware: The Threat of Blog Spam (Splogs) to WOM Marketing & Market Insight'
Just as spam became the kind of nuisance that prompted tighter standards and resistance techniques in the world of email, so is the "splog" (spam blog) epidemic spoiling the blogosphere and making it necessary to provide automated systems for blocking and deleting them from the web. According to Howard Kaushansky, part of the problem of rampant splogging is that there is no economic incentive for sploggers to stop.
During the Q&A session, Howard was able to explain that, no matter how detrimental (and annoying) splog producers are to others in the blogosphere, as far as they are concerned, they are simply marketers, doing whatever it takes to sell one more ring tone, one more cell phone, or one more piece of property in Florida.
The truth is that sploggers have an extremely detrimental effect on the entire blogosphere. Because so much time and energy has to be put into blog monitoring to thwart their efforts, splogs are a drain on resources. Instead of working to make the blog world better and more deft, time and attention has to be spent (wasted) on splog control. Also, the proliferation of splogs has "a chilling effect on bloggers," Howard said. The more splogs there are, the more legitimate bloggers turn away from the format. The splog epidemic is a toxic cloud in the blogosphere, and each one detracts from the legitimacy of the genuine bloggers.
After detailing just how awful (horrible, nasty, revolting, obnoxious) splogs are, Howard went on to explain some of the currently accepted methods for filtering splogs out with a particular focus on out-smarting glued words in URLs ("buyarolexrightnow.com" is an example of a glued URL).