acado.com sustainable web.dev > Developments against splogism

The birdflu blog got much attention this week. Several people and large websites editors like About.com, Yahoo Picks and some very good bloggers have reviewed it and spoken out a suggestion to subscribe.

There have also been critical voices. One week before I got an email request from podz, owner of the Tamba2 blog. He asked me to remove his posts and to stop aggregating his website. Unfortunately I didn't handle his request carefully enough. I just trimmed the quotes into a minimum, but I didn't blacklist the website. So again some days later I fetched one of his articles. Reason enough to post a public removal request, calling me a splogger. We had a fair discussion about it, you can follow the comments there. After all we have found a list of unfriendly design bugs in my blogs.

First, there was an abuse by content fraud because of the "Continue reading -original post title-" link. Visitors may have expected to get to the original website, able to read more of the authors post. Instead the link resulted in a bunch of related, aggregated and weighted posts. Shortly after I recognized the problem I started removing these "Continue reading" links.

Second, some people disliked the small ad below the post. They said it is too near by the original quotations. They also said its a way of monetizing external content and thats not legit. I think this behavior is part of the culture of the human build web and I agree with the idea. So in a second step I removed these ads.

Bird Flu Monitor is not a splog. It is a legit work. I am distancing myself from splogging objectives and methods. My work is to build and explore topic maps with semantic text processing as a field of research. In my opinion these developments are important for the future of web, because aggregated websites are useful. If they offer a good qualified service and if they are build with the reader in mind, not the seo marketer.

Please let us follow the discussions. Thats what this blog is for. Sploggers don't talk with their customers and critics. We do.