10.20, Wednesday 19 Nov 2003

On fake weblogs (mentioned yesterday): there's a well-linked discussion on clone blogs at MeFi [thanks Paul M], and Porn sites hiding behind blogs [thanks to a few people, Paul was the first] appears to figure it out. The fake weblogs use the referrer spam to increase the Google rank for the whole domain, which is a porn site. Shame. There's some interesting potential in auto-generated weblogs with small human involvement. I wonder if you could use the Bayesian systems that work on figuring out spam email to look at everything being linked on Blogdex, and train it to post only things you would want to post anyway. You could have a more-or-less "original" weblog by training the network to rank higher less-or-more popular links.