Blog Spam

I hate spam. If I could have a dream Tech job, it would be to put on a superman suit each morning and go out and kill spammers with my supreme technical abilities. If only I were that smart.

I have used Blogger for a long time, but I haven't actually used it in a while. I decided I would start using it again so that I may have a more anonymous forum for my thoughts and opionions.

Blogger blogs display an iframe at the top with a next blog button. It can be fun to just browse the blogs with the next blog button. You never know what you're going to get. I've found some really good blogs that way.

So yesterday I thought I'd go for a good "nextblog" walkabout, and what did I find? Spam blogs. Splogs. The ratio of splogs to real blogs was about 10 to 1. It made for a very impoverished treasure hunt.

What I don't get is how do they make any money? Who on Earth happens upon one of these splogs and thinks it would be a good idea to click on an ad? If I saw an ad on one of these sites I would not think the company doing the advertising was reputable at all. So who on Earth is stupid enough to buy from the advertiser? It's crazy, but then I simply don't understand capitalism sometimes. Why does everybody want to shop so much? What a waste of time.

Apparently there is a greasemonkey script out there that will restore the blogger navbar so that when you go to one of these sites you can report the blog. But that's too little too late. What I would like is for the nextblog button to be disabled, and that upon hovering over the nextblog link, it would automatically search the next site to determine if the content meets certain coniditions that constitute spam or objectionable content, and if so, forces nextblog to keep searching until a real blog is available. Then, without ever showing me the blogs, it could turn the button on, and thus let me know it's safe to click.

How's that, Blogger? Might be a slow and painful user experience, but nothing is slower or more painful then clicking nextblog, getting a spam site with no navbar, clicking the back button, clicking nextblog, getting another spam site with no navbar, clicking the back button, clicking nextblog, getting some teenager blog with embarrassing music blaring at me, clicking the back button, clicking nextblog, getting 10 more spam sites....