Friday, November 04, 2005
A new place for spam's old pitches
A good article from the Washington Post on blog spam
Now that Web logs — blogs, for short — are a popular online pastime for millions of people, scammers are finding new ways to exploit them as vehicles for junk advertisements.
The Internet has even coined a term — splog, a combination of spam and blog — for a phenomenon that 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 comments posted by readers that actually have nothing to do with the subject at hand. Instead they are advertising pitches or attempts to get you to click on an unrelated Web site.
They also can be set up as bogus blogs; go looking for a blogger talking about, say, bathroom renovations, and you could wind up on a Web site that has a few random renovation-related words but that mainly tries to get you to click on links to advertisements.
