The Real Blogger Status: One Small Step For One Man ...

Friday, January 18, 2008

One giant leap for Blogger kind?

The answer to that question remains to be seen. However, it appears that Blogger is starting to do something about one problem - the frequently reported porn associated with the "Next Blog" link in the Navbar.

Eventually, Blogger will be able to relax its heuristic spam blog detection, which will lighten the load of complaints about falsely detected blogs. With less complaints, Blogger Anti-Spam Team can focus on the real problem.

Not bad for a Friday, especially considering yesterday's Wildfire.

Thanks, Pete.

Of course, we all know that this is just one symptom removed. The real problem remains.

Blogger Support, apparently, being able to block all spam blogs from the "Next Blog" link is a start. It implies that they can identify the unwanted blogs.
Individually identified false positives, unfortunately, will never happen. How many non-spam blogs will be blocked from "Next Blog" too? Since the "Next Blog" link is random, no blogs are ever guaranteed readers from that link. And not a lot of bloggers have the ability, or the inclination, to monitor their blogs getting readers from "Next Blog".
So, to keep it in perspective, I don't see that the new "Next Blog" filter can be applied to the Blogosphere in general, without some pain. Maybe, though, Blogger can do some automated testing, and look for false positives and false negatives with some level of success. I hope that they will try, anyway, before they deploy the filter, currently being tested with "Next Blog", to the Blogosphere.

Newzflash said...: so if I understand this correctly, the splogger is basically using the fact that people can not control which blog they visit (using the next blog option), because the 'next blog' option doesnt give you a way to choose which type of blog to see. If this is the case then blogger 'may' discourage the sploggers from using blogger as a way to splog, by having a directory of blogs instead of the 'next blog' option. I mean if they had a directory with categories to put the blogs in, then I think it may discourage some of it...of course the splogger could always just put their 'splog' in any category, though. well...at least it may help to a certain extent...; 24/1/08 20:19
Chuck said...: You're partially there. With "Next Blog", all blogs are in one category, that's the idea. With each person publishing one blog each, everybody becomes equal, and access is totally random. The sploggers, however, are publishing hundreds of blogs constantly, which used to mean that you, using "Next Blog", would eventually come across one of their splogs.

With the volume of the splogs, whatever category they were put into, they would dominate that category. And categorising the non-splogs would fragment their potential audience, with blogs in an unpopular category getting very little traffic.

With "Next Blog" being only one category, anybody surfing "Next Blog" will come across blogs of all descriptions. That's the attraction of "Next Blog".; 24/1/08 21:43

Friday, January 18, 2008