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Jan
10
Vlog Spam
Filed Under Money & Marketing, Technology
An interesting development to watch will be how vlogs will be turned into spam. No doubt they will be. Everything on the internet eventually gets turned into spam. According to Umbria Communication, a Boulder, Colorado company, there are 80,000 blogs created every day. They also claim that about 20% of those new blogs is spam - or a splog, as they’re called (splog = spam blog).
The way that auto-created blogs have flooded the internet, I would say that 20% is not such a bad percentage. Of course it’s bad for the visitors and the search engines, but it’s probably nothing compared to what it could be, and probably will be. That said, when the majority of blogs are still authentic, you’re probably doing pretty well. A sad but true pronouncement.
But this the internet, and as long as Google and the likes of Google (I pick on them because they are currently number 1) give the power that they do to their own system of automation, there will always be a way to beat them. A system, almost by definition, can always be beat. Having a system, and giving your automated “system” the power to be the final arbiter, means that you are giving blackhat webmasters the plan for how to get to the top of their search listings. Try as you may to keep it a secret, it’s still a system, and so therefore can always be cracked because it doesn’t have the ability to make truly complex decisions.
Systems, and computers in general, are amazingly powerful - but only in certain ways. They offer a certain kind of brute strength that no human mind could practically ever achieve. And yet, even a Google computer couldn’t understand an analogy so simple an 8-year-old could understand it (unless it was programed to do so - and, of course, you can’t program for true orignality).
All that is to say, I wonder how spammers will turn vlogs into spam. Their first and probably most effective point of entry will be through vlog tags (the keywords that vloggers use to tell a potential viewer what’s contained in the vlog). As powerful as vlogs will be, this will always be the limitations of vlogs - that because they are video, they aren’t easy to sort through. Vloggers will still need to use text to bring people in because text is easily scanned. Although this prediction is probably too easy to make, here it is: the porn industry will be our first vlog spammers. In fact, I’m sure they’re up to it already.