Thu

Aug 25
2005

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

How to Save the Web from Splogonoma

Great post by Doc Searls on the future of free and paid content. Doc muses on the evolution of paid content content sites, especially in light of the rumored Google crawl of premium content, versus the "live web", which gets dominated by advertising, link spam, and automated link sites that try to pay for themselves via Google Adsense. (It's this last problem that Doc refers to as a cancer, which he's named Splogonoma.) Doc sees a dark future for the "live web" unless the big guys (Google, Yahoo! etc.) who have tools for fighting this stuff contribute some of what they know, perhaps via an open source project, to be used by the rest of us. Thought provoking. Very much on point with my recent struggle to understand how O'Reilly got snared by search engine spam.

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Comments: 7

  Shelley [08.25.05 09:18 AM]

Come on, Tim: "snared" by search engine spam?

You're writing like the O'Reilly web sites were just sauntering along, innocently minding their own business when suddenly, and without provocation, they were jumped on by evil, lurking spammers and forced to submit to hosting links. Or else.

Hosting said links since, what was it? Two years? Three? Did they hold your favorite puppy hostage or something?

  Roger Lancefield [08.25.05 09:58 AM]

'Splogonoma'? Pleeease! Whoever coined that, enough with the childish terminology already.

It's taken long enough for many non-geeks to accept that 'blog' is actually a term used by mature adults and one that refers to an important phenomenon. ;)

  Eric Giguere [08.26.05 04:08 AM]

Paid/premium content won't solve the problem. As soon as a general "passport" mechanism for paid content is provided, it won't take long before paid sites of dubious value show up to participate in the revenue model. Such sites would never be able to sign up subscribers on their own, but once you have a broad, all-purpose subscription available, they'll start looking for ways to get their content into this "premium Web". You'd need strict policing of paid content sites to keep them out, which may happen initially, but I suspect in the long run one or more of these subscription plans will break down and let the quality slide, possibly simply due to the sheer amount of work required to do the policing.

  Kenny [08.27.05 12:53 AM]

What competing search engines need is a web of trust. They could start by manually assigning trust values to certain core websites (all the manually vetted sites in their directory).

Then the trust is passed on automatically automatically from site to site via links out from the main sites, weakening significantly with each link.

More importantly, each user should be able to add or remove certain sites from their personal web of trust, thus influencing future results to contain more of what they want. I for example would downgrade a lot of blogs to exclude blog spam, but not all, as people like Jon Udell generally have very interesting links.

  Tim O'Reilly [08.28.05 07:21 AM]

Shelley --

When you started accepting this kind of paid link, did you know it was to game google? I don't believe we did, and while our ad people knew by the second year that improved search engine placement was the goal of the advertisers, I didn't know about it till last week. And even then, it wasn't clear that this was going to be the kind of problem for search engine results that it now looks to be. So that seems to me a reasonable use of "snared."

For that matter, in the whole battle of advertisers versus user experience that has been going on for the past ten years, it still isn't entirely clear why this is worse than other types of advertising. The comment on my other post about "negative externalities" comes closest to capturing the problem. However, even there, I have a bit of a problem. Is Google really unable to work around these kinds of links, given all their expertise and resources, or is at least some of their complaint along the lines of "thou shalt have no paid text links except through me"?

In any event, I do believe it's a complex situation, and one that is only now coming into focus for a lot of people.

  Eric Giguere [08.28.05 02:38 PM]

It is a complex situation, especially if you factor click fraud into the equation. Greg Skinner and I are having an interesting discussion about whether pay-per-click advertising is viable or not in the long term that others might find interesting.

  Ewan Gunn [08.29.05 04:09 AM]

I'm a tad confused - 'splogging' is just advertising spam on blogs, right? But how many of the worlds bloggers actually warrant or get this advertising nonsense? Not your average Joe Bloggs on the street, I'll bet. In fact, all these blog sites (yes, including Radar) are only blogs in means - but in actual fact tend to be more 'commentable news articles'. When Tim (or Nat or whoever) comes up with a post saying 'it's my son/daughter/wifes birthday today! Happy birthday dear' then I'll consider this a blog.

I'm not saying what it is, is a bad thing - quite the contrary; I really enjoy reading the articles and news on it. But that's the point - it's articles and news, nothing that the majority of 'real' bloggers (Joe Bloggs writing about his first day at his new job; Gamima writing about her happiness over her recently arrived grandchild) would consider actual blogging.

There are obviously similarities - the ability to comment on any article, the way anything at all can be written (well, almost) - but in essence, how the blog feels is entirely different - far less personal.

It also sounds a bit arrogant to say that 'splogging' is a cancer of the blogging community, when what is actually meant is that the 'online freelance opinion columns' are being targetted - not the 1 million plus users of LiveJournal or BlogSphere or where-ever.

I realise and understand the implications of what is being discussed, and it is something that does concern me. I just think that a) the field has been narrowed somewhat and b) the emphasis on who is affected is completely wrong. This is a far more wide-reaching problem than simply affecting these columns - it permeates every aspect of the internet these days and something does need to be done on a high level.

(Perhaps hosting services can provide their services cheaper, thereby lowering the overheads, and minimising the amount of advertising money a particular site needs to operate?)

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