— Text by Stuart Brown
logspam is bad. It must be; it has 'spam' in it. But what on earth is blogspam?
Let me give you some context. On the social media sites, such as Reddit and Digg, self-submission of your own work is generally seen as OK - implicitly on Digg, assuming it's worthwhile content, and explicitly on Reddit.
Daniel Miessler came out strongly in favour of self-submission - under the premise that more submissions from new writers, new content sources will allow the best of those to break through where they might not have done before.
Great. So I can submit anything I churn out then? And I can be rewarded with a metric boatload of traffic if folk think it's good?
Yes. Well, sort of. Submitting everything is probably a bit much. Not every blog post is worth reading. Some lack context. Some are just a links to other blog posts. Some are just badly written.
So if I submit everything I write, is that 'blogspam'?
I suppose it could be classed as that, particularly if the reason you're doing it is solely to get traffic. Submitting everything you write, regardless of quality or suitability, will reduce the signal to noise ratio, and thus make it harder to find good content.
Another thing to bear in mind is the thorny issue of original content. Whilst it's fine to quote other blog posts or news sources verbatim, if that's the whole of your post then you should consider submitting the original link, rather than your own insubstantial blog post.
But what about the ad revenue? The traffic? The glory!?
Spoken like a true blogspammer. But at least you're not posting pictures of cats.
In the context of Digg, I class blogspam as a post that just links to another and regurgitates present content with little or nothing original. The Gawker network is my prime pet-hate when they take other people's content and get the traffic from it. They even cross-link and some of those posts make the frontpage.
They just have enough of their own userbase to push things onto the frontpage.
I don't have any issue with people posting their own stuff. Digg will sort the good from the bad.
Reddit does a pretty good job of defending against blogspam due to its Karma system. If you submit too many posts that get voted down, your karma can go negative. A high karma means a submission has a better chance of making it to the front page. A low karma means your submission might not even get seen by many people.
I read that icanhascheezburger.com makes a lot of money. The author didn't intend to - but does. At $500 a week for the cheapest ad-space, I dont think they care that they post pictures of cats.
http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jul2007/sb20070713_202390.htm
I'd love to hear their conversation when they meet new people. "So, what do you do for a living?" "I, um... post picture of cats on the internet."
@Haacked - Reddit does do a good job at filtering out the good content (although I'm not sure what effect Karma actually has). One problem I've noticed is that sometimes even good content can go by the wayside - I suspect there's a need for more people to read the 'new' page.
@Matt - Interesting link!
I wasn't claiming Icanhascheezburger was blogspam, of course - just any excuse to link to LOLCats :-)
I think really the worst kind of Digg spam are nebulous political articles. There's a lot of good, breaking political news on Digg. There's also a lot of bunk, factless, and irresponsible articles Dugg just to promote one person's view point. I'm starting to see this a bit on Newsvine as well.