Watch Out For Splogs!!

Published: Monday, November 07, 2005 Online-Casinos.com

WATCH OUT FOR SPLOGS!

Spammers quick to exploit every new trend

The US media were this week lamenting the growing corruption of blogs as scammers find new ways to exploit these popular online vehicles for exchanges of opinion by millions of people using the Internet.

Spammers are intruding on blog boards to exploit them as vehicles for junk advertisements, resulting in a new addition to the Internet lexicon - SPLOG - a combination of spam and blog! The phenomenon follows in the footsteps of rogue advertising such as spam e-mail, junk mail, junk faxes and adware.

The new forms of spam can show up on blogs as fake reader comments that are frequently irrelevant to the subject at hand, or comprise an unwelcome and clumsy intrusion linking to other sites where the splogger's real business interest lies.

For the most part, the ads are new pitches for old schemes, but they are posing enough of a customer nuisance that Internet giants such as Google and Yahoo are developing tools to clamp down on them. Genuine blog users soon spot "sploggers" and give them as short a shrift as those on conventional message boards.

The real answer probably lies in alert webmasters and moderators taking fast action against the new menace.