There are plenty of things we can do “legally” which we can take a higher ground on. its not illegal for me to go out and rip monstrous smelly farts in public, but I don not do it. I get at least 4-10 of these per post. Within 60 minutes of a new post, I get a splog trackback. In this case, I wrote a post that ripped the splog site, and they still auto-generated a fake blog post.

I cannot agree more with (2) yet very little attention is put here. Google creates all the incentive for it, yet refuses to put all that “genius” power to work! Remove the incentive, remove the splogger, and leave us little peon bloggers in peace, who get so excited for a track only to discover it si a scripted… smelly…. monstrous…. legal fart.

And I will venture to point out here that this is not something that ThePlanet.com should be addressing.

We very much do not want our ISPs to get involved in what is appropriate or inappropriate uses of domain names and IP addresses. We know that such companies are not accountable, and that such power would be very quickly abused.

The problem with splogs, etc., is two-fold:

1. They are basically legal. There is no legal risk or sanction against the practice. There is no law against taking someone’s content and converting it into a spam weblog (or, more accurately, if there is a law against it, it is not enforced to even a tiny fraction of the enforcement against college students sharing scratchy MP3s of their favorite2. songs).

2. Google makes it profitable. Although Google has done some good things – like zero the GoogleRank of pay-per-post sites, and zero the Wikipedia ad-spam sites (sites that take wikipedia content, plaster it with Google ads, then SEO the actual Wikipedia page out of existence in the search results) they have done little to favour original content, at the expense of splog content.

Both of these relate to why I am opposed to the commercialization of open educational content – but nobody seems to understand what I mean by that, even in the face of such obvious examples. The drive to commercialize everything is what drives splogs – and what pushes the genuinely useful content – such as the original blog posts in this blog – into oblivion.

:) Rachel, NZ