The Wardman Wire

First Splog

This is a brand new blog, but I have already been splogged .

For anyone who hasn’t heard the term - a splog is defined as:

“an artificially created weblog site which the author uses to promote affiliated websites or to increase the search engine rankings of associated sites” (Wikipedia)

This article, published on March 10th this website, appeared on a splog website called Public Info Bulletin the same day. The link has been nofollowed, which will prevent it being taken into account by Google or other search engines. At that point this blog has only been live around 1 week.

The ironic side of this is that this article was grabbed because it contains the word “Veritas”, as in Veritas Party, but the splog is spamming a computer backup software package called Veritas.

Please pay my invoice?

Splogs are an occupational hazard for bloggers, but just to see what will happen I have sent this splogger an invoice for reproduction of the summary of the article - as described on my about page. Needless to say, the website does not contain an email address, but the contact email for the domain registrant is zane_kirchberg7169@yahoo.com.

To: zane_kirchberg7169@yahoo.com

As you should be aware, articles or summaries of articles from mattwardman.com used as the entirety of an article on another website are subject to a fee of $250 - as stated on the “About” page on mattwardman.com.

I note (see attached screenshot) that you used the article “Crossing the Floor Makes me Dizzy”, on 10th March 2007.

http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2007/03/10/crossing-the-floor-makes-me-dizzy/

This email is a request for payment. Therefore please contact me on this email address to confirm your method of payment. Paypal is preferred.

Rgds

Matt Wardman

There are other ways to deal with Sploggers but I thought I should try this at least once. The chances of a response are minimal.

I’ll come back to Splogs and other forms of Spam in a future article, but here are some resources for further reading.

Anti-Splog Resources

For those who want to look into this more, there are a couple of plugins (add on programs) for Wordpress that aim to address aspects of the Splogger problem:

• A Wordpress plugin to insert copyright notices into your Webfeeds: Angsuman’s Feed Copyrighter Plugin. This is a straightforward plugin.
• The Digital Fingerprint Detecting Content Theft WordPress Plugin (Review by Lorelle) applies a digital fingerprint to your postings.
• A more aggressive approach is taken by AntiLeech (Review by Lorelle). Make sure you know exactly what you are doing with this one.

And three resource websites sites:

• Plagiarism Today: a site “regarding the issue of plagiarism online.”
• Fighting Splog: A blog about splogs on Blogger.
• Splogspot: A place to report splogs.

Tags: splog, splogger, spam, plagiarism today, lorelle on wordpress, splogspot

[tags]splog, splogger, spam, plagiarism today, lorelle on wordpress, splogspot[/tags]