I'm Dr. Joshua Schwimmer, a nephrologist and internal medicine physician in New York City. • Kidney Notes was the first active nephrology blog. (Trivia: Kidney Notes is so old that the National Library of Medicine still uses it as an example of how to formally cite blogs.) • Professionally, you can find me at Kidney.nyc. • Kidney Notes is for educational purposes only, not medical advice. Consult qualified health care professionals. See disclaimer.

Thursday, September 29, 2005

The Physiology of Spam Blogs

From Google Blogoscoped:

"Spam is like the aliens among us. They look like us, dress like us – but they also eat the houseplants."
-- John Holbo

This post may end up on spam blogs. Let me explain why.

In my recent interview with Joe Harris, a keyword blogger, several “high paying” keywords got mentioned (like mortgage, gambling, poker, or mesothelioma). There was an unexpected side-effect to this post, as it was also featured in Google News; many spam bloggers, I suspect, subscribe to Google Alerts for their spam keywords. They then fill their (mostly Blogspot-hosted) plogs with posts sent to them via Google. The final irony is that they’re often using Google AdSense to make this a commercial venture. In other words: someone’s abusing Google to get traffic, on a blog hosted by Google, filled with content automated by Google, and they’re making money from it via Google...

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