Of Splogs and Content
Much noise has been made these last few days about splogs. A splog being a blog which is artificially generated by aggregating rss feeds and then putting them up in seratim. It is the dark side of Web 2.0 – the light side being memeorandum and the broken side being The Canadian Bullet.
Apparently the distinguishing characteristic of a splog is that it is designed to gather Adsense dollars (as if) and not to actually perform any useful function. OK. Those do exist and someone has figured out a way of auto generating them and putting them up on blogspot – a bad thing.
A good thing is Peter Grossmann’s Bird Flu Monitor. Yes, it is automated. Yes it does take content from a variety of sources. No it does not have Adsense in a big way – yet; but there is no reason why it shouldn’t as the site makes a real contribution by bringing together various aspects of the discussion about H5N1.
I don’t have time to read every blog entry on bird flu if I have to go and find them myself. But I do have time to drop by The Bird Flu Monitor every couple of days and see what I missed.
October 27th, 2005 at 10:23 pm
I find aggregators like The Bullet, CanConv, and Non Partisan Canadians to be invaluable. And I have discovered a fair number of new blogs that I love through them. Like it or not, splogs perform a valuable service and I figure they’re entitled to a few AdSense bucks if it helps keep the links flowing my way.
November 1st, 2005 at 5:06 pm
Thanks for the post, Jay.It was a good feeling when I was reading your friendly comment about my bird flu blog. Later I made some additions at acado.com. Building useful aggregators is an interesting field of work and we our still learning how to fit a page best to its user. And the splog discussion is a necessary thread as well.