Content Spamming as Content Remixing
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Written By Reprise Media | June 29, 2005 | Share This
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Even scarier than the TomKat engagement, the radio broadcast of The War of The Worlds combined musical interludes with a mock emergency broadcast warning listeners of a hostile Martian invasion. Nowadays we might call something like that a remix or a mash-up, something Jason Dowdell of MarketingShift knows all too well.
His post today called Content Spam Remix takes a look at remixes in a different light - that of seo spammers as a form of remix artists.
He explains:
“One of the biggest areas of search engine optimization spam nowadays is content spamming. Taking content from other sites [on of the most well known examples is the displaying of search results that have been screenscraped from google or yahoo] on sites for purposes of ranking well. The other main area of content spam is software like ArticleBot. Articlebot will take any paragraph or piece of content and rearrange [remix] the words and then spammers create doorway pages with this content and it’s virtually undetectable by the major search engines.”
The comparison doesn’t seem too out of left field for me, though it feels weird to apply the term “artist” to anyone who creates works on a mass-scale solely for the purposes of income generation (then again, it worked for this guy so what do I know?).
What makes seo spammerscontent remix artists so infuriating is how hard they are to catch. Filters, patches, and blocks can barely keep up with the daily assault. These marketers keep finding more and more ways to alter the content so that engines find it undetectable. I guess that’s creativity, in its own sick way.
As for other forms of content remixing, this O’Reilly interview with Lawrence Lessig inspires those kind ‘Amens!’ that make you talk out loud to your computer as you’re reading. Check out this excerpt on why the younger generation doesn’t regard the written word with the same sanctity of the older set:
“For those of us over the age of 15, our conception of writing is writing with text, and in fact our tradition protects the right to write with text and to draw upon other people’s writings with text quite substantially….But if you think about the ways kids under 15 using digital technology think about writing–you know, writing with text is just one way to write, and not even the most interesting way to write. The more interesting ways are increasingly to use images and sound and video to express ideas. Well, all of those ways of writing under the law as it’s understood right now are basically illegal unless you secure permission from the author up front…And the struggle is to get people to recognize that there’s no good reason for the rules to be so radically different between the two contexts, and that we ought to be encouraging a wider range of creativity using digital media…”
Wow. If you’re looking for more, JD Lasica’s New Media Musings is a good place to start.
Topics: SEO |