Any time a new medium emerges with a low barrier to entry, people are going to try to make easy money off it. Online that means spam. Spam doesn’t just mean email, though. There’s Tag Spam, blog comment and trackback spam and Splogs, or spam blogs. Splogs show up all the time in the RSS feeds I set up for searches. It really bums me out. The splogs appear to have valuable information about whatever search term you’re looking for, but they are really just worthless attempts to get you to click on ads or click through to another site or to raise the inbound link profile of another site. It’s wretched, and there are so many of them! Since Blogger in particular is free and easy to use, many people are just filling the blogosphere with crap. I have my ideas on how to deal with it, but I’m writing today to point you over to an interesting article titled “Meet the Sploggers”. It’s a description of the goals and tactics of just a few current sploggers out there. It’s a pretty interesting read, I think.

For the record, I think that one way to deal with splogs is to find ways to integrate attention data into filters for our search results. For example, I could say “show me only those resulting pages that have been flagged as spam by less than 5 unique readers.” or “show me only sites that people from more than 2 continents have spent at least 30 minutes on in the last 3 days” or some variation of that. There are ways to game systems like that too, but it becomes more of a burden to do so as these obstacles are built up.

Finally, check out social-recommendation enabled search engines like Wink.com. Tools like this, and social bookmarking, will allow you to just search inside the validated worlds of your trusted friends. Obviously limitations exist here, and you’d want to wander out into the wilderness in many circumstances, but for the cleanest search results…you may want to look to a “walled garden.”

Ultimately, I believe that search to RSS is one of the most powerful tools in the Web2.0 sphere. It automates the rapid discovery and delivery of key information. It is a powerful means of getting and staying on top of your field.

Technorati Tags: splogs, search, wink, spam, rss, scumb_bags,