Dec

4

Anatomy of a spam blog

December 4, 2007 |

Sometime last week, Marshall Kirkpatrick twittered about a post glorifying PayPerPost that was making its way up to the Digg homepage. As I have a deep seated hatred for PayPerPost, I couldn’t help but check that post out (and bury it).

As I head over there, it seemed like a decently designed blog, but also noticed that the writing was somewhat too polished. Sure enough, thanks to the [Via - CNET] at the bottom of the post, it turns out that the whole post was lifted from CNET. Word by word.

Given that there was no editoral around the post and just a lot of advertising, I would surmise that this was a clear violation of copyright.

Now spam blogs are nothing new, but few are as brazen as Daily Rumors. The post on iZea actually made it to the Digg homepage, but thanks to Digg user sc0re pointing out that it was plagiarized and Marshall making the PayPerPost connection, it was buried soon after hitting the front page.

After this, most spam bloggers would have counted their blessings and moved on to writing another blog.

Not so Daily Rumors. The next day, I notice a Daily Rumors post up on the Reddit frontpage. This time, it’s a list of 15 Brilliantly Times Sports Photos.

The same post made it up to 1452 diggs and the digg homepage as well, though it was submitted by a user who apparently fell for the ploy.

This list was copied from Jamie over at The List Universe, though there the list is actually 30 photos long, just like the text on Daily Rumors used to say (it was changed after I pointed it out in the Digg comments). However, I guess the spammer got tired copying all the photos, so he stopped at 15.

Because the spammer deletes every comment, there is no point

Both the post at digg and reddit was posted by the same user (his name on Digg is Daniel Iorgu - he joined two weeks ago and has almost 300 friends). He only writes short comments on reddit (”nice info,” “awsome car” etc.) and only submits posts from various blogspot sites (most of them have “daily” or “rumors” as part of their name). He submits roughly three posts a day to reddit. His posting on Digg is a bit less frequent.

His submission on Digg obviously all also just link to various plagiarized posts.

Also, if anything, he is persistent. His submissions on reddit go back 4 months. At that time, he was shilling a product called Privacy Guard (a useless piece of software that deletes your browsing history for only 48 Euros).

The Daily Rumors blog actually has close to 18.000 visitors and 20.000 page views a day. Given that most users only stay 9 second, I would guess the site doesn’t monetize well, but there is probably some money involved. Other sites in the Daily Rumor Universe aren’t doing so well, though.

Interestingly, though, a large number of users on digg and reddit don’t seem to care.

Looking at his digg friends a bit more closely, it seems there is a nice little mafia of spammers using the digg shout feature to keep each other posted about what stories to digg.

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2 Comments so far

  1. ThePete on December 5, 2007 1:41 pm

    So, is there anything we can do to combat this sort of thing? How do we know our own blogs aren’t being ripped off? I hate the thought of someone making more money off of my posts than I make.

  2. Frederic on December 5, 2007 3:31 pm

    I am afraid there isn’t much we can do about it at the root, but if you see any of your posts show up on social news sites, call them out.

    There is no point in commenting on the posts because it will get deleted anyway.

    I am thinking to inform the hosts as well. You might be able to complain with them and have them take down the blog directly.

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