Clint Sharp

Mark Cuban, Tim Bray, and Chris Pirillo all chime in this weekend about the Google Blogspot splog problem. It’s hitting me as well. Thankfully, they’re not hitting my vanity feeds, because an unknown blogger/vlogger/hacker isn’t worth writing about in splogs, but my hometown and soon to be again residence of Fort Smith, Arkansas, is getting hit mercilessly. I subscribe to a Technorati feed searching for “Fort Smith”, which should bring about about 4 or 5 legitimate posts a day. I’m now getting 20 to 30 splog entries daily. It’s ridiculous. Only 80,000 people live there, don’t they have better things to spam about? I hate to say this, because places like FreeVlog recommend them, but shouldn’t Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket, et. al. just exclude BlogSpot indefinitely until this problem is resolved? How does this factor into the Atom 1.0 API design? Is there facilities for captchas built into the protocol? This will make for an interesting next couple of weeks as this problem comes to a head.