Spammers play on social media
Came across a great post by Niall Kennedy — thanks to a link from my friend Om Malik — in which Niall digs deep beneath a recent story on weight-loss tips that got posted to the front page of Digg and finds what appears to be a series of connections to offshore spam blogs. More and more, this kind of thing is infiltrating social news engines like Digg and Netscape.
To Niall’s credit, he doesn’t just stop at noting that the story posted was classic “Digg bait” (since it mentioned dieting for computer geeks), but drills down to find out that it came from a blog whose main focus appears to be dental services, and then goes further to check where the blog’s domain was registered — and gives anyone interested a brief overview of link-spam practices and tactics, including CPMs for keywords involving dentistry, which is why the fake blog focused on that area.
Muhammad Saleem at The Mu Life and Dr. Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests — two of the most insightful bloggers writing about social media right now — each have a take on the news, which comes on the heels of the recent fake news story about a Sony PlayStation recall that made it to Digg’s front page. In a nutshell, both Tony and Muhammad are of the opinion that sites like Digg need more human moderation to counteract such attempts.
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(On Nov 22nd, 2006 at 10:42 am)
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