Ads On Blogs: Latest Development In "Battle of The Splogs"

Interesting thing happened today. Accessed my blogspot account and continued as usual in drafting some intelligent analysis on the topics of the day. Ok some of you might be thinking intelligent is the wrong adjective! Anyway, I go to publish my post and was met with a word verification code.

It seems amid a deluge of bad press from A-List Bloggers about spam blogs and no doubt some high level head scratching at Google headquarters they have implemented this feature in the latest skirmish of "Battle of The Splogs" (Is it just me or would that make a great movie title.)

Here is Blogger's official line in the help directory:

"Word verification on the posting form is meant to be a spam reduction mechanism for BlogSpot in general, and is applied to certain potential spam blogs by an automated system. Because this is automated there will necessarily be some false positives, though we are continually working on improving our algorithms to avoid these. If your blog is one of the false positives, we apologize. Having the word verification on your posting form does not prevent you from publishing and does not mean that your blog will be deleted or otherwise punished if it is not actually in violation of our policies."

Needless to say that Ads On Blogs is a "false positive". Umm I think you need to fine tune those algorithms guys! This is a necessary evil and will no doubt improve the spam issue. However, if this becomes a permanent feature (a cumbersome feature at that) on many "false positive" blogs then Google will see a flight of some genuine users.

As Ads On Blogs will be shortly transferring elsewhere to a souped-up, turbo charged site this will not be a problem for us much longer! More on our transfer and announcements on some exciting developments next week.

As a footnote to this, it will be interesting to see if Adsense revenues are hit by this spam offensive?