Web Comments Cheaper than AdWords
- By: cyclelicious [privmsg - website] On 23rd Dec 2005 In
Web Comments is a Firefox extension showing blog backlinks to the website you're viewing. It was only a short time before splogs started linking to popular websites so that they'll show up in Web Comments.
At Google I see backlinks from a religious apologist, an AdSense site that clumsily scrapes news with no theme that I can detect and another scraper AdSense site with VOIP advertising.
Yahoo has several links from SEO sites. They're not talking about Yahoo; I believe they're linking to Yahoo purely for the purpose of getting seen in Web Comments. In the screencap, I've highlighted the spammy backlinks.
I'm seeing similar results at other popular websites. Web Comments is enabling a new kind of spamvertising. It's a kind of site-specific AdWords campaign except you don't pay for the clicks. It a little ironic that Google is the company that created and promoted this extension.
This is probably much more philosophical...
...and broad than I should be posting on an article like this, but oh well.
Maybe it's the season, maybe it's just my growing frustration with black-hat'ness and such, but... do any of you see ANY way for services to remain both reasonably open and also spam-free in the future?
Literally, nearly everything of value on the Internet seems to have been co-opted by greed and selfishness. E-mail. Web services...
Ideally, I had hoped that peer pressure would have mitigated much of the damage. However, now I'm thinking that closed networks (walled gardens, if you will) may be the right answer in the future. It's counter-intuitive, but seems the only way to protect information and communities from having their wells poisoned.
Of course, then you have to deal with insularity, accusations of exclusivity, and so on. Guess there's just no way to win this battle.
It's enough to make me want to keep treasured online and offline finds to myself. For instance, there are a couple of retreats I attend each year that are very magical and wonderful in many ways... and safe. People leave their purses and wallets and laptops and such strewn around, without any fears of theft. I've thought about writing the specifics up on my blog, but then I feared that, hey, this too would then be plundered by those without morals ("Hey, everyone, head over here to easily steal a bunch of money and goods from a bunch of naive idiots...")
I'm not trying to portray myself as a saint. As a human being, I've certainly acted in ways online and offline that were purely selfish and even damaging to others. It's clearly a continuum... the white/black, etc., hence the 'gray.'
But I'm saddened by seeing things shifting more and more towards the black online.
Is there any hope for turning the Internet around? ARE walled gardens the way of the future?
[and should I have included this as a separate post?]
In the early days of TV
In the early days of TV people had delusions and imagined everyone would be sitting in front of them learning Greek and Latin. History has shown that is clearly not what happened. I think people have the same aspirations for the web, and I think it will follow the same path as TV.
This looks like an
This looks like an interesting extension, but what information am I giving to google by using it?