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Spam blogs ruin the web for everyone.

by alec on May 16, 2011

I keep an RSS search for terms like conference call, and conference calling.  It’s a simple way to keep tabs on competitors to Calliflower.  In recent years, though, it’s become a meaningless sludge pile of garbled English as SEO “consultants” create endless spam blogs by “respinning” content using a combination of thesaurus’ and reordering of sentences.

Take, for example, this gem from the spam blog called All Conference Calling.com, titled “Flat Rate Conference Calling”:

Flat rate conference calling is a service provided by a meeting phoning company which bills by toned prices. This particular rate usually includes a interferance per-minute charge, allowing companies the data of just how much they’ll spend per person per hour. How do we determine if flatrate conference calling suits your company?

To know flat rate meetings, you need to have a near take a look at how many associates you will use during a phone. In other words, the number of individuals will be logging onto these types of calls for each program? This can be hard if your company intends to hold a number of conference phone calls per month, each along with variable numbers of participants. For example, assume the first business call of the month will probably be using the panel associated with company directors. This might only be ten to twelve individuals. But, after this phone you may want to possess a session with your department mind there are gone 50 of these. Later that month, you want upon having a phone together with your entire employees, which is within the 1000′s! You can observe exactly where toned rate meeting phoning could be a issue.

What are “toned prices”?  “Interferance per-minute charges”?  The hyperlinks in this piece (all removed by me) simply link back to the main site.  The purpose of this “keyword rich” nonsense is to boost the search ranking for the main page, which consists of nothing but blog postings scraped from other people’s RSS feeds and advertising.  All Conference Calling.com is simply a way for it’s owner to make a few hundred dollars per month in advertising.  Multiple that by a thousand, and suddenly you have a business.

And how about this gem on “article” repository article2008.com.  Titled “Keep Away from Conference Calls that Waste Everybody’s Time”, it reads:

It’s slightly simple to have a conference call move awry. All it needs is a loss of ok planning. Positive, Convention calls are easy to make, contain much less bodily effort (via traveling), and save time. On the other hand, at the turn aspect, a conference name that may be badly controlled will certainly be a disaster. Just as in a regular meeting, everyone has to be informed, and everybody should come on time. Should you thought reaching a gathering late used to be unhealthy business etiquette, so is being late for a convention call. In any case, it’s merely a gathering in a different incarnation.

Grammatically mangled garbage spit out of a bot that uses a thesaurus to perform word substitutions to create new “original” content and game the search engine.  Just what is a “Convention call”?? To add insult to injury, the piece finishes with a hyperlink to a website on yeast infections.

What happened to the web of quality content?

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Twitter and RSS – Peas in a Pod

by alec on May 6, 2009

Image representing Steve Gillmor as depicted i... 

Image via CrunchBase

 

Fans of Steve Gillmor’s Gillmor Gang podcast will know that he’s had a bee in his bonnet about “real time” for quite a while now.  In Steve’s world, communication on the web must be instantaneous.  Post to a blog, and it should be instantly indexed and accessible on Google, Feedburner, and any other property that distributes content.

Amen to that.

Yesterday Steve suggested that RSS – the syndication system that powers the web today – is dead.  He writes:

It’s time to get completely off RSS and switch to Twitter. RSS just doesn’t cut it anymore. The River of News has become the East River of news, which means it’s not worth swimming in if you get my drift.

I haven’t been in Google Reader for months. Google Reader is the dominant RSS reader. I’ve done the math: Twitter 365 Google Reader 0. All my RSS feeds are in Google Reader. I don’t go there any more. Since all my feeds are in Google Reader and I don’t go there, I don’t use RSS anymore.

But RSS is not dead. It’s true that RSS hasn’t been the mechanism by which news stories break for some time now.  However, not all news is “real time”.  Some of it’s analysis and opinion that can, and perhaps should be consumed after the fact.

To say that RSS is dead is to say that the only television worth watching is CNN News.  All Anderson, all Sanjay, all Larry, all the time. 

Twitter has its place as a fabulous announcement and conversation mechanism.  It’s a river of information, and RSS readers can’t touch it there.  RSS readers, however, are the superior means to aggregate and consume information. 

 

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Winer on Wikipedia

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Snarf This!

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Snarfer is a new feed reader just released, by Snarfware.  Supports both Atom, and RSS, and sports a plugin architecture to allow new feed formats to be easily incorporated.   It’s free, because (like Google) it includes contextually relevant adware links above each post.  The adware is unobtrusive, and unlikely to ever bother you. It has [...]

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SSE: A Real World Problem Being Addressed

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Yesterday’s announcement by Microsoft of the Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) to RSS made a lot of news.  Bloggers chimed in everywhere too, which means I am late for the party. I had a quick read of the draft spec last night, and read Ray Ozzie’s blog posting on the topic.  The problem SSE is solving has been [...]

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