IceRocket owner Mark Cuban has warned  Blogspot bloggers that their blogs may soon be excluded from IceRocket and other search engines due to their domain being overwhelmed by spam blogs.  (via the Search Engine Journal and  the Blog Herald)

He says:  “Blogger is by far the worst offender. Google seems to be working hard to adjust their relevancy indexes to exclude splog from having influence on search rankings, but they don’t seem to be doing anything more than removing reported splogs (spam blogs). Kind of like going after the zombies one at a time with a shovel.”

I doubt exclusion of a major service is the right way to fight spam. In fact if this becomes a trend, i.e. IceRocket, Technorati, Bloglines, BlogPulse … etc. will boycott the Blogspot domain,  wouldn’t that force Google to accelerate either by development or acquisition it’s plans to “own” the blog search space rather than see it’s bloggers flock away? 

On the other hand, how important is it for Google to maintain Blogger as a free service? Any individual blogger can afford a symbolic price, say $3 /month which would still add up to significant cost to spammers who create blogs by the thousands automatically.  An even better option may be to slap them with a one-time blog creation fee. 

It may be less elegant .. geeky … whatever.. .but when technology fails, why not use economic means to fight spam? 

Update (8/17):  Frank  has created a site called Splog Reporter where anyone can flag Splog/Clog.  Frank, will Rel 2.0 be a bookmarklet (“this is splog”) that pre-populates the fields? 

Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Blog Spam, Spam, Technorati, IceRocket, BlogSpot, Google

… had I not used Qumana:-(     Two posts, to be exact.  

A blogger’s worst nightmare scenario:  finish editing a fairly long post, hit “save” only to see all the work gone due to a momentary server outage.   Bummer.   But  wait, Offline Blog Editors to the rescue! 

Qumana is a new, free contender in this field, comparable to BlogJet, Ecto, w.Bloggar ..etc.  I’ve been experimenting with it for a while, and my only major complaint was about the tag-soup it produces.   However, for the last two days it let me down bigtime. 

Yesterday I had to stop editing an almost finished post, so I saved the contents to a file – this morning, trying to open it I discovered Qumana created an blank html file of 1k size … all my work is gone:-(   This afternoon I wrote a somewhat longer piece, with several references to other sites, that simply took a while to pull together … finally, I’m done, click “post”, and voila! – Qumana exits, no post to my blog, and no saved copy either:-(

I’ve had it with Qumana – I’m considering writing all my posts in Onenote or Evernote, and just paste it in the online editor.

Update:  BlogJet, here I come!  (In fact I am writing this update using BlogJet)

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Qumana, BlogJet

Easy tool to make cute or not-so-cute buttons for your Blog.   Here are a few samples:

Found on the

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Blogging, Button, Buttons, ButtonMaker, Software, Software Tools, Utilities