Weblog spam

Slashdot has a posting about the growing problem of weblog spam. They’re not talking about comments or trackback spam. They’re talking about whole weblogs that are nothing but spam for the search engines.

This is a problem for the search engines that are using RSS, and it will be critical for those search engines to come up with a filtering technique that eliminates the chaff from the wheat.

Luckily, though, this is not a general problem for RSS. Unlike email, you can subscribe directly to people’s feeds and be assured that you’re only going to get the items posted by those people. If you’re reading nothing but individual sources, weblog spam is completely non-existent. That’s one step up that RSS has over email. (That said, very little email spam gets through my filters these days, so I’m sure the problem is a tractable one for the RSS search engines.)