Upon doing an ego search in Technorati, i came across a disturbing blog: Dominos Pizza. One entry begins with “I talked on the phone today (why yes, I do still use analog communication media…) with danah boyd.” At first, i was like no you didn’t. And then i was like, wait, i know that statement. It comes from a post on mamamusings. But it’s not the whole post. And then i started searching for parts of the rest of the entry and figured out that it’s a mash up of different blog entries from different places. No citations, no references. All just out of place. There’s no clear link spamming going on (although there are some strange linkings). There is though a statement about why Dominos Pizza is the best (which makes me cringe since i’ve been boycotting them for 8 years running given that the CEO funds violent anti-abortion organizations).
So what gives? Any other sleuth out there have a good sense of what this blog is about? Weird weird weird.
Just your typical spam blog. Blogspot is riddled with them and they always pull content from other sites, publish it (I believe via email) sprinkling it with spam links.
All of my PubSub subscriptions now cut out anything with blogspot in it. It’s just a big waste of time. Sad really…
Can anyone say “Search Engine Optimisation”.
The other major search engines (other than google) use context-based relevance searching, so that random grabbed text from other highly ranked webpages would suggest (to the search engine) that the faked webpage is also relevant and accurate, and therefore should be ranked higher.
Thats why there are no direct links to dominoes pizza on the page, but lots of mentions, increasing the ranking of the dominoes pizza homepage.
Perhaps i should get Liz to rename that post “Dominos is EVIL”
It’s a synthetic spammer, created from others’ blogs, and already marked as such in Technorati, so you shouldn’t see it again. Liz may have a DMCA case to take it down.
Relax,Dominos is evil and their service is lousy.
There’s a “flag” feature in blogspot at the top right… I “flagged” it and you should, too. It will be interesting to see if blogspot keeps it up there if enough people flag it.
I’m seeing more and more of these damn things crop up.
The blogware / blog search companies are aware of the problem.
One thing we should all do:
If you see one, report it. Report it to the blogware firm (blogger, msn spaces, typepad, etc) and to the service you came across it from (technorati, icerocket, etc).
Alex.
I’m pretty sure that Dominos has a new CEO. The founder and pro-life CEO sold the company IIRC.
I found a few of these through my vanity search feeds last week. Spam blogs are shitty, and for now we just have to tag ’em and hope Blogger bags ’em.
What’s particularly infuriating is that there are lots of software packages for sale (I refuse to link to them) that automate this “scraping.” Every week, I see snippets of my blogs rolled into splogs (spam blogs), and it really pisses me off… both that there are jerks that make these programs and greedy/clueless people that use them.
I almost wish that Blogger and LJ and all of them charged $5 (one time) to set up a new blog; it’s not too steep of a price for most folks, IMHO, but it’d deter the spammers from individually setting up dozens or even hundreds of splogs each week. Or heck, even $1, but require it from a credit card; that way, Google et all could easily kill accounts by name if necessary :).
Alfred is right. I think Monaghan sold in 98 for ~1bn. Of course their pizza is still inedible.
If there’s no particular link from that paragraph, it may just be filler. They’re grabbing random text from around the web, some of which mentions they things they want to link to. For those things, they’re trying to increase releance in the local context.
In the rest of it, they’re trying to make it appear statistically like a regular blog.
The problem with a credit card or charging plan is that it means that the vast majority of people in the world could not blog. Teens can’t get credit cards in this country. And most people outside of the US/Europe don’t have credit cards. There would be no way to be anonymous (which is important in places like China). Plus, while $5 isn’t a lot to you, think about what it means in Africa. The whole point of Blogger is that it is accessible to EVERYONE. But it does raise a question of how to stop the spammers.
wow. that blog has wernicke’s aphasia.
How about making people pay $1 for a blog that Google can see? Most teens likely don’t want to be searched on anyway.
http://www.condraonline.com/files/freakoflove.mp3