I’m gathering some data from various groups so I can write a more complete post on the subject – specifically, I am gathering some data on spam 12 and 24 months ago relative to today, as well as gathering specifics on our DMCA approach (including typical turn-around time from receipt to action on our part). I’ll send you a note when that post is up – I hope to have it in place next week.

But in the interim, I’d like to say that we take spam very seriously, and have no incentive to allow it to remain on Blogger. Spam hurts our reputation – among individuals as well as among machines (like Google’s search engine, among others) – which hurts our brand and can negatively impact our business.

Every blog we host includes a “flag blog” button in the navbar, which allows readers to tell us when a blog is violating our content policy; if a blogger has disabled that navbar, we provide a simple form to report here: http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/request.py?page=main_tos. And we have a number of internal algorithms (whose particulars we do not publicize, for obvious reasons) whose purpose is to identify clear cases of spam and remove them from the system.

We revamped our DMCA policy this summer – http://buzz.blogger.com/2009/08/let-music-play.html – and in my regular meetings with our legal/policy teams, enforcement has been quite efficient of late. (Sounds like we didn’t respond in a timely manner on the posts you reported; I’m looking into what happened in that specific case.)

While we can always improve – there remains spam on Blogger – we have dramatically reduced the overall amount of spam on Blogger over the last two years, and significantly curtailed the % of pageviews that we believe are spam. That said, if you have any data indicating that the problem remains particularly virulent on Blogger, by all means let me know about it. We’re committed to getting this right, and will take any external indicia of ongoing problems as useful guides to help benchmark against.

In any event, I’m rklau@google.com, and my blog is at http://tins.rklau.com/. Keep in touch, and let me know what other ideas you have for improvement.

–Rick

http://www.theinsidercode.com/forex-trading/2992/friday-night-jazz-ipod’s-guilty-little-pleasures/

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BR: I don’t think so . . .

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BR: 1) They used to have ads, now they don’t.

2) Its not the links, its the copying wholseale of entire posts.

3) Doesn’t have to be monetary — for whatever reason, they want traffic without working for it . . .

That might be OK, and non-Evil. Let anyone publish but only boost the seemingly genuine. Of course a lot depends on their robots identifying the genuine.

I just set up this pseudonymous identity and blog with Google. I hope to make it “A public slice of me, in which I strive to be both honest and anonymous.” I also hope that if I write honestly and publicly I’ll be found to be genuine.

A week or two ago on Slashdot there was a linked set of articles written as an expose on and by Facebook scam artists. The main point I took from it was that Facebook was extremely tolerant of the scammer’s activities so long as the ad revenue kept rolling in.

One of the major catalysts of the first Dot-com bust was the realization that many ad-driven websites were making a large portion of their revenue selling links to each other. They bought ads to get people to their websites so that they could make ad revenue directing people to another website. There were remarkably few terminal sites, sites that would pay money for ads so that they could sell the user a real service. If Google ever manages to clean the scammers out of their customer base, I have a hunch that they, and the general public will find that Google has remarkably few customers who are trying to sell legitimate users a legitimate product or service.

Google’s customers are not Google’s users. So far, because of Google’s golden-boy status it has been able to keep its user’s interests at the forefront (for the most part). Some day Google may be backed into a corner when its customers ask Google to do something that is not in their users’ best interests.