Header graphic for print
Real Lawyers Have Blogs On the topic of the law, firm marketing, social media, & baseball

Google responds on Blogger spam blogs

Mark Cuban, backer of Ice Rocket, a blog search engine – aggregator (more on that in next post), reports Google has responded to his and others' complaints that Google was effectuating spam blogs (splogs) by offering free Blogger blogs hosted on the blogspot domain. Mark wanted Google to deploy an authentication tool for posting to the Blogger blogs so spammers would not be able to write script kicking out millions of spam posts. Well, Google has responded.

If I'm going to criticize for inaction, its only fair to praise for action. Google has taken the very needed step of adding a captcha word verification system to blogspot. I went in today to see if the process of setting up a blog had changed, and it definitely had. Word verification was part of the process.

Then I went to a blog I had set up which didn't have much of anything in it. I tried to add a post. Same thing. Thank you Google. Are you reading this MSN? Your turn.

Mark is viewed as a bit of an agitator by a lot folks. That's good. Just like the NBA needed Mark, as a team owner, to tell it like it is, we need an agitator in the business & technology arena. He not only is a backer of Ice Rocket, but I also believe he backed Weblogs Inc, recently sold to AOL for about $40 million.

  • http://lawfirmit.blogspot.com/ oncee

    Looks like Mark won. Blogger now requires word verification for blog posts.
    Google says:

    Word verification on the posting form is meant to be a spam reduction mechanism for BlogSpot in general, and is applied to certain potential spam blogs by an automated system. Because this is automated there will necessarily be some false positives, though we're continually working on improving our algorithms to avoid these. If your blog is one of the false positives, we apologize. Having the word verification on your posting form does not prevent you from publishing and does not mean that your blog will be deleted or otherwise punished if it is not actually in violation of our policies.