I am a new blogger and I have already been pinged several times by spam bloggers (a.k.a. sploggers). After looking up the invaluable Wikipedia and other sources, I now know that this is a problem of epidemic proportions.
So what is being done? SplogSpot is a site where one can supposedly report sploggers. I tried to report one of the pingers but could not succeed despite three tries.
Several parties suggest that genuine bloggers put copyright notices on their posts to enable splog spotting as well as to provide remedy for those who actually have time to write letters and threaten lawsuits. Here is an article that I found from a Wikipedia link which also helpfully displays the copyright messages. It also suggests letters and lawsuits as the remedy.
But instead of individuals going after these spam blogs, here is another idea. How about a central site, run by some sort of Internet body – maybe a body like ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) can be created to deal with the problem of spam blogs and blog spams. Once a URL is reported to them, they can get the IP hosts to mandatorily take down the spam blogs.
It is entirely possible that they could help with blog spam too, specially when it comes from China or Nigeria. Or help with copyright disputes between actual bloggers!
Alternately, since software is used to create spam blogs maybe some genius can dream up of software to get rid of this menace.
Google and other search engines as well as Internet bandwidth suppliers can fund such a non-profit because these splogs hurt their business. Bloggers like me would happily report such IP addresses because sploggers hurt bloggers the most.
And in the mean time is there a wordpress widget that when pinged, puts in these notices?
