Splog Spot Blog » Privacy

Fair Syndication – On the Right Track?

Jon — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 12:27:38 +0000

The advent and rise of the splogs has triggered a debate between bloggers, the online ads industry and the Fair Syndication Consortium that debates the situation whether ad companies should remunerate web sites that use stolen content. The opposing parties has people on both sides raising their own points, on the side of the bloggers content should be guarded and deemed as personal property, on the side of the consortium they say that they are fighting for the said right, getting these splog sites to get their claimed earnings from ads but steering some of the profits down the line to the bloggers who were responsible for the blog posts.
Very much a blurred line exists between the grounds by which they stand, and being sponsored by many big businesses and other major players the consortium is indeed raising a very real fact, splogs are here and there is no sure way to combat them or prevent them from plagiarizing content from other sites, kinda goes to the tune of “If you can;t beat them, Join them!”. The bloggers and several thousand writers are still trying to obtain ways of shutting down these splogging sites but as mentioned, there are ways by which you can indeed profit from these sites but the line is thin and you can end up losing more that you hope to gain. The debate is detailed in the following post from TechCrunch where more details are brought to light.

Splogs on Your Blogs – Kicking Back

Jon — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 03:55:20 +0000

Splogs are blogs that use your content without permission, posts them onto their sites for profits without even giving you a mention or credit for what they’ve done. They do get away with it and in the process they earn in terms of traffic to their sites thus increasing their profits. Most experts suggest kicking back by adding a simple plugin called RSS Footer that comes from Ytoast.com which allows you to automatically add an extra line of content to your feed that automatically places a footer that say’s “Post From :” with a link to your blog along with your blog’s name. Splogs are simple copy/paste artists who leach traffic from your site to theirs thus getting traffic that should have been yours.
People on the WordPress forums suggest that you rename the wp-signup.php file which they say is quite effective at stopping them dead in their tracks. Most others have implemented simple yet effective re-CAPTCHA implementation which can be obtained from their site. This seems to be a very effective screen for botnets who automatically prey on your blogs, relying on human vision and interpretation for a security measure that seems to defy current computer technology. But the easiest way seems to be re-naming the sign-up scripts which is being implemented by most bloggers and admins alike. Opinions differ on the best approach so do keep tabs on future posts for new and improved ways to battle the menace that are splogs.

Splogs – Scourge of the Blogs

Jon — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:53:37 +0000

Social media has become too much a part of our daily lives that we simply cannot stay away from them. Blogging is one of the earliest manifestations of the social internet, like many other internet based innovations have been subjected to attacks than can be compared to junk email, spam and phishing scams. The splog is a blog post that is randomly sent to blogs, flooding your comments with incomprehensible entries that will result in overloading of your hosting service for the benefit of the people who make them. One of the best defenses would be to keep your plug-in’s updated to the latest versions which allows it to deal with those tagged as junk posts. Use the built-in WordPress utilities to screen out or block specific keywords but it is recommended that a plugin still be chosen form the wide selection available in the publishing software’s developer boards or even from forums. The third-party screening system prevents unallowed posts that contain random characters and many other junk form getting into your blog, hence not wasting bandwidth or storage space.
If you have the necessary plugin’s use them and activate their features to better protect you, adding another layer of protection from other developers from the open-sourced community. Most pressing software have forums and support forums that try to assess needed changes which can be remedied temporarily or you can wait for the necessary plug-in to go into circulation. unprotected blogs can get over whelmed in a few days, overwhelming the system causing a crash. Whatever the reason these sploggers are after, they are bugging many a bloggers with their drugs, Medicine and other mundane offers. These people can even use this process to boost their ranking on Google or the many other social networks out there. Keep updated and if a comment sounds fishy, thar’ she blows, and just delete themfrom your comments box. Using the WordPress toolkit can protect you from splogs but too much can prevent mail, comments and recommendations from getting through to you, so use wisely.