Oh, how glad I was to see the Slashdot post on the Ham and Spam of Weblogs. “At times we see upwards of 90 percent of the traffic from Blogspot being spam,” says Feedster CTO Scott Johnson–while predicting still more trouble ahead. Feedster and the rest can’t solve the problem without admitting it. I applaud Scott’s honesty.
Within the “ebook” listings, Feedster is filtering out spam somewhat better than before in the wake of a complaint from the TeleBlog. But Technorati has yet to evict the BizboxSolutions blog, a prolific spamster, from the ebook tag category. Yo, Dave Sify (photo)? It’ll be great if Technorati can follow through with your promise as CEO to investigate the clutter in “ebooks.” BizboxSolutions is even ripping off RSS feeds from other sites and publishing them in a way that makes the causal reader think they’re original content. And of course, it’s done for Google placement–and perhaps Technorati placement, too, if the greedsters know of the WordPress-Technorati relationship and the role of category-generated tags.
David to David
Please, Dave. Reroute the sleazes to “marketing” or “ebook marketing” or whatever–you can use hotlinked text pointers from “ebooks” so fans of marketing spam will know where to look.
Note that reasonable people won’t mind classy commercial blogs in “ebooks.” Via Tenebris, Stephen Fraser is a great online ambassador for Lulu, with an acceptable S/N ratio and well-written and informative original content. But the BizBoxSolutions blog is a parasite and pollutes both blogdom and Technorati.
Furthermore, marketing books of all kinds should be in a different category from “ebooks” so they will not overpower e-books on other topics.
Sleazy diet food promos, too
Same for diet books and diet foods and other diet products. BizBoxSolutions may even be committing link fraud or abetting it. For example, the “more” in a diet-related post filed under “eBooks” actually leads to ads for diet foods with the contination of the supposed article hidden under the huckstery. Notice? The “more” included mostly foods and other products, not even books for the most part, at the time I was looking.
I don’t insert “Technorati” tags above my posts to route traffic to quick-buck greedsters like BizBoxSolutions and its partners. Please act to help genuine e-book enthusiasts, Dave, or I’ll think about dropping Technorati–and vehemently encouraging others to do the same. Thanks! You don’t want blogdom to be as slummy as Usenet, do you? Nope? Figured. Good luck with cleaning up the “ebooks” tag category!
Detail: Via email, I’m going to forward Dave Sifry a copy of this post. Far from being anti-Technorati, I’m rooting for his company to succeed and for the self-tagging concept to work out. I love Technorati’s new makeover. But what’s the point if it’s just beautifying the spammed tags from BizBoxSolutions?
