In business, the last thing you want to do is get the journalists and authors upset with you. However, sometimes you've got to cross the line...
I've just sent mail to the PubSub system admin folk asking them to kill the FeedBurner and Blogger feeds being generated by Brandon Hong's site "Marketing Rampage with Blogs and RSS ". Hong claims to be the author of a number of books and videos on using Blogs and RSS, however, in my opinion his site demonstrates the worst possible blogging practice. Unfortunately, it is a set of practices that we're seeing more and more of. Hong's site appears to me to be a "BotBlog" written by machine simply to provide search-engine bait.
Hong's site is clearly not written by a human being. Rather, it is clear that the posts are generated by some sort of script, program or bot that publishes new entries every minute or two. The volume itself isn't a problem -- some folk publish a lot. (Scoble? :-) )However, the posts themselves are non-sensical and have no value to readers. This is probably yet another of the many scripts that harvest text off of other blogs and then paste the harvested texts together to create content that will attract search engines. This is "search-engine bait" -- not fit for human consumption and not what we built PubSub to support. A sample entry follows:
RSS Publishing (on Holiday)
Providing strategic semi monthly views on best RSS uses and practices latest news privacy SearchEngineWatch reports of a new service Speakwire which allows you to listen audio selected feeds instead reading them through synthesized speech technology And they even invented casting word this time it s Autocasting and means generating automatically from an feed For one not bad idea if the sound quality intonation enthusiasm warm were better but I just don t see hitting anywhere near mainstream Computer generated simply cannot be compared emotion filled human voice at least yet So question now is what podcasts achieve
Notice that while this may look like english if you just glance at it, if you actually read the text, it makes no sense. It appears that this text was collected from five or six distinct sources and pasted together without any regard for the language.
We're seeing tens of thousands of these "BotBlogs" being created on the free hosting services and we're going to be doing our best to identify them and eliminate them from our feeds. I'm sure that some folk will take issue with this policy, however, I strongly believe that it is in the best interest of our users to filter this stuff out. It should also be noted that we generally will not identify the methods that we use to find these things and we won't announce (except on rare occasions like this one) which feeds we're filtering out. If we discuss our identification methods, people will simply learn how to work around those methods. If we identify which feeds we're eliminating, we'll be revealing valuable information about our methods.
"Censorship" is, I think, one of the most frightening things that a service like ours can do. Our users are the ones who should control filtering -- not us! But, I feel that this sort of BotBlog is a misuse and abuse of our system and of the whole syndication infrastructure. It should be understood that we aren't eliminating feeds because of the subject they discuss or because of the identity or affiliations of their authors. Nonetheless, if we find "BotBlogs" we'll cut them out.
bob wyman
i think they should censor your blog too for writing crap.
Posted by: bb | October 21, 2005 at 20:15