I remember my online professor telling me about splogs some time last year. It was one of those hallway conversations we frequently had. “Hi, how you doing? How’s the job/internship search going? How’s your mom? I saw your dad last week, he said ‘Hello.'” To which I’d answer each in succession and follow up with some novel idea I had or cool thing I’d come across. He’d show off the latest project he was working on for the JMC Web site or the latest “really cool” tool he’d managed to get the school to buy. This conversation was no different. I said I was starting a blog, and somehow we started talking about splogs.

He said they were a threat to journalism, to legitimate content creation and advertising. They just take a bunch of stories you’ve written and use a computer to mash up headlines that will drive people searching for say Colts merchandise or Kent State University to that site instead of a legitimate source. Add in a sprinkle of Google text ads and maybe a few banner ads, and even if only one in 100 visitors clicks anything, you could still make some money for the nominal hosting fee you pay. While the practice itself is annoying at best and downright harmful, as Fred would argue, I could see the point.

Today, in my “lafayette, indiana” Google alert, this link popped up. I don’t get the point of the site.

The paragraph in that post almost makes sense, as if someone was writing quickly in stream of consciousness and made a few typos. In fact, it kind of is an interesting thought. But I was intrigued by it being named “Just” so I clicked on it and found that it was just a bunch of really random posts about, well, nothing.

I took out the subdomain. It’s just a bunch of directories with words like “making,” “power” and “getting.” Each is a blog using the same default WordPress template. Each with no real point or content.

I could at least understand the reason for existence if the blogs had ads on them. Or maybe if these posts had links in them to some other site or company or anywhere. They don’t.

At first I thought, well maybe it’s someone setting up a domain to become a splog later on or something. But, these posts go back six months or more. It’s not something that was just created.

It’s just the gibberish blogs with keyword heavy headlines. A few dozen of them on this single domain.

What’s the point?! Can someone explain this to me?

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 24th, 2007 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.