Anyone who's been on JoeUser long enough remembers the days of diamond-d,
Orrin Woodward, Island Reef Casino etc. These were blogs that pushed
either a company, a product or a service. Often times they would submit a
flood of posts to crowd out the Recent Articles list. And it turns out
that some of those blogs were part of a Google bombing effort to raise one
company's Google ranking. These were articles that didn't invite
discussion, and were usually bad copy-paste jobs of work posted elsewhere.
We've cleared some of these offending blogs out, but many have just sort of died
under their own ineffectiveness..
My question then is, is this actually spam? Spam is generally defined
in terms of unsolicited email, or in the blogging world unrelated comments
posted to an article that merely are attempts to advertise an unrelated
site/product/whatever. But can the blogs themselves be spam?
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines spam as "unsolicited usually
commercial e-mail sent to a large number of addresses"
Even Wikipedia (unbiased, untainted source that it is) when mentioning
blog spam specifically limits the definition to email and comments,
essentially looking towards directed and unsolicited advertising.
Take a look at the JoeUser/Stardock Terms
of Use and you'll see we currently limit the definition of spam to directed,
unsolicited emails etc.
But how does that play here on JoeUser? A site that is very different
from typical blog sites, where the emphasis is on community and sharing of
articles, instead of everyone being an isolated island disconnected from
everyone else on the site. Sites like
Blogger, LiveJournal,
Xanga etc do not connect sites together
automatically, and there's nothing in the way of automatically showing users an
aggregate of recent or popular articles. So on those sites, advertising
blogs vanish into obscurity unless heavily linked to from outside websites.
JoeUser, with it's syndication across all the Stardock sites does all of that
automatically. A single article posted to the Personal Computing section
will be crawled by Google from at least three different Stardock sites (JoeUser,
GalCiv2, WinCustomize). And our sites aren't exactly poorly ranked by
Alexa or Google, so the spam potential goes way up.
Aside from the auto-linking issues however, does spam need a different
definition for sites like JoeUser? Are these articles even Spam
necessarily since they're not unsolicited advertisements? You don't have
to click on them. You don't have to download them. They don't interfere in
any way with your system, your Internet connection or anything critical to your
day-to-day life. They can be annoying, they can push your article out of
the "Recent" list, but is that spam?