Blogging Challenges (Part 4)

The negative side of blogging arises in the form of spam blogs (splogs), whether as a contrivance designed purely for the purposes of promoting products or services and which has no substantial content or blogs developed to manipulate search engine rankings with links to affiliate websites. There are also individuals whose commentary on open blogs (those allowing feedback) promote irrelevant products or, more usually, pornographic websites – which in recent years has become more problematic as roving spambots penetrate weblogs and leave automated responses and links.

Fortunately leading blogware developers have released countermeasures such as captchas (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart), graphical representations of letters and/or numbers which real users must type in before a blog post is accepted. Google also introduced a new HTML link, “nofollow” in an effort to neutralise the value of links (and, some argue, to maintain search relevance).

Filtering out contrived spam content continues to prove challenging for search engines and frustrating for the blogging community and Web as a whole.

Communication

Blogging is as much a phenomenon as the World Wide Web but in a different way: the Web enabled people to view a wealth of diverse content; blogging offers almost anybody the opportunity to contribute to it. And for some, a chance to find an international audience and a voice for expression. Many of the Internet pioneers were drawn into dialogue with people they came to know via a terminal interface during the period electronic mail (email) and the Internet was under development. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) came along and community chat was perfected.

It’s all about communication

And when an eruption of interest propagates across the Web a blogstorm occurs which rallies bloggers to a common interest or dispute, and which may give rise to the fall of political leaders or swamp a web server such that it collapses under the strain of a million hits.