more benjamin

08 Jan 2006

Looking into this “Benjamin”’s blog, I am going to hazard a guess that this is a spamblog (splog). Most of the content is scraped or pieced together, though with a consistent broken-english style (either on purpose or because the spammer/owner is not a native english speaker). For example, check out this post, which is a splicing of random excerpts with no internal consistency.

Then check the nonsensical comments on this post, which are left by blogger profiles, such as “starbender”, which run many other obvious spam-blogs.

I assume the intent here is to comment and link like crazy so as to build up authority with the various search engines/aggregators such as technorati that assign weight to links and such, and then at some point convert over to a genuine ad-hosting spam blog of some sort – similar perhaps to how scammers will attain ebay accounts and spend months/years building up solid positive feedback only to use the account for one big hustle.

But the non-automated methodology at work here is fascinating – the comments on Nashville is Talking, though pointless and sometimes nonsensical, are at least superficially related to the post at hand. Is human labor being used to automate spamming in the same ways that menial gaming tasks are being outsourced to cheap labor?