WP Autoblog, Spam, & Trackbacks

Posted in Spam, Wordpress by Elliott Back on November 19th, 2006.

I recently had a post of mine syndicated in short format through WP-Autoblog by Robot World Online:

This is a perfect use of my plugin–to aggregate in a non-copyright-violating format a lot of different resources on a topic–in this case, robots. The guy even enhanced my short summary by bolding the keywords around which he’s aggregating. Now, some of you might disagree, but I feel that this is not spam.

The second issue involves trackbacks, about which Matt Mullenweg, creator of Wordpress, has been quite adamant:

As this software runs by default, it strikes me as irresponsible. Judging from the data I’m seeing from Akismet, it’s causing tens of thousands of pingbacks that people are considering annoying enough to mark as spam, and about two-thirds of those are from blogs which are clearly splogs using your software.

There are two cases where pingbacks are sent out:

The blog using my plugin is clearly spam
The blog using my plugin is not spam

In both cases, pingbacks are useful. In the first, you want to know if your intellectual property is being abused. The ping is an alert system that someone has copied your content. In the second case, the pingback is harmless, because someone has aggregated a snippet of property in a more useful glob.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 19th, 2006 at 3:22 am and is tagged with robot world, autoblog, glob, snippet, aggregate, robots, wordpress, two thirds, tens of thousands, spam, intellectual property, blogs, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.