Spam on blogs

Wired has an article about blog spamming, covering both fake blogs which only contain spam keywords for trying to fool google, and people adding spam comments to real blogs. Unfortunately the latter isn't unknown to me. I had to delete several spam comments from this blog this week, in spite of having what Wired calls a "Captcha", and Blogger calls a "word verification", the system where you need to read distorted letters from an image and enter them to add a comment to my blog.

Of course the number of spam comments on the blog is much lower than the number of spam e-mails I get to the highly visible Tobold@Gmail.com address. Curiously the spam comments are better targeted. The spam mails I get are the same that everybody else gets, Nigerian dictators promising millions, fake lottery winnings, bank phishing mails, cheap mortgages, offers of porn, penis enlargements, and different potency enhancing drugs, about 50 mails a day, none of which are offering anything remotely related to my interests. Plus a rising amount of spam I can't even read, because it is in Chinese. The comment spam entries on the other hand are nearly all offering WoW gold. So the spammer at least correctly identified what the blog was about, or the other way round, identified a blog somewhat related to the goods he was offering. Of course the spammers don't always get it right. I was chuckling when my review of the "Las Vegas" TV-series on DVD resulted in several spam comments advertising online gambling and casinos. :)

As Wired says, blog spam is an inevitable consequence of the Web 2.0 concept of user-created content. As soon as you consider a reader as a commodity with a commercial value, monetizing eyeballs, the idea of "stealing" those eyeballs isn't far off. Which then gives rise to eyeball protection schemes, like the "word verification" on this blog, which never work 100% against the spammers, but always end up diminishing the value of the protected site. I'm sure I would get more comments without the "word verification" thingie, but then I'd need to spend too much time deleting the spam manually.