aye.. News, I'm not so keen on, even though I pay for my favorite paper newspaper. Articles (longer) and other content however, sure. It has to be easy to do though. I don't want to spend 30 minutes filling out a hugely long form with my card #, home adress, work adress, age, gender, nationality, favorite food and favorite color just to get there. Make it short and sweet.

Via Marketingfacts (fellow nominee in the MarketingSherpa survey by the way) I found that Loic Le Meur has also spotted these "spamblogs" littering the likes of Technorati. While he notes that "This is really bad." (meaning the blogs, not technorati itself) other commentors agree showing that we're not alone in spotting the problem. Ever alert David Sifry Technorati CEO chips in with his two cents as well;

"Yes, we know about this and are combatting this on a daily basis. It is a bigger problem than many think, given how easy it is for people to create robots that create fake blogs on free hosting services to serve as link farms or for adsense fraud.

Technorati is working really hard to identify and eliminate this spam, and is developing both automated and social-oriented filtering and spam identification tools. I think that this is going to be a major differentiator in the next year or two, as spammers and SEO operators have discovered the value of the blogosphere in directing and orienting attention on the web...

This is why we helped organize the first Web 2.0 Spam Summit earlier this year, and we're working with all the groups, large and small, to help squash this before it becomes an even bigger problem."