Blog Spam - The End of CGM Innocence?.

This morning I logged into my gmail account and found a big fat pile of "blog spam."  Two years ago I started writing a blog dedicated to my new Honda Civic Hybrid.  Until about a month ago, I enjoyed a steady stream of excellent comments (even critical pushbacks) from various readers about hybrid car experience. Now I'm swimming in blog spam.  Yes, I had heard growing warnings from my work colleagues at Intelliseek, especially those who managed BlogPulse, that blog spam was posing a growing threat to the blogophere.  But it didn't really sink in till one of my own blogs was subjected to an avalance of meaningless, irrelevant do-anything-for-a-damn-click spam.  It's been truly disheartening to say the least, and I can't decide if my reaction is borne of naivette or just being a hopeless romantic about the power and potential of the internet.   I can't be the only one feeling such dissonance. The blogophere is bursting at the seams with blog passionistas  -- we'll see a ton of them next week at BlogOn -- but blog spam represents a significant "chink in the armor," so to speak.  Not insurmountable, but a real challenge,and certainly an issue bearing on the ultimate "trust" scorecard for CGM.

Blog Spam Characteristics:  Spam bloggers are masters at finding a creative or contextual hook for arresting eyeballs around a given message.  Once clicked, they barf up irrelevant, self-serving and useless garbage.  It's classic bait-and-switch, but most of it is automated.  Many of the same techniques that search-engine optimization firms tout to increase search engine page rankings for brands or companies are put on steroids in the blog-spam space.  Just about every blog platform is vulnerable, but some appear more vulnerable than others, especially Google's Blogger platform, which is where I'm receiving an almost endless flow of "no one is accountable" garbage.

The Road Ahead: Some of my work colleages such as Sundar Kadayam, Natalie Glance, and Matt Hurst have been applying advanced text analytics to fully "dimension" the spam issue.  Expect more news on this soon.  In the meantime, let's keep the faith and hope for a light at the end of the tunnel.