So I read PostSecret as a guilty indulgence. Right now, it is locked down due to a programmatic sweep profiling it as a Spam blog:
Your blog is disabled
Blogger’s spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What’s a spam blog?) Since you’re an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.
We received your unlock request on September 16, 2007. On behalf of the robots, we apologize for locking your non-spam blog. Please be patient while we take a look at your blog and verify that it is not spam.
(From: PostSecret: Blogger has locked PostSecret )
First of all, given how many blog search queries I run from day to day (either tracking InfoPath back in my Office days or now the Windows Live Photo Gallery) I have deep appreciation of getting rid of Spam blogs. Most of which seem to pop-up on blogspot. In fact, if I see a link to a blogspot.com blog, I’m highly likely to skip looking at it because usually it’s a modern day textual mash-up of reposted text from popular blog feeds and Spam links. Tracking InfoPath discussion became near impossible.
But you’ve got to have a better pattern than what happened to PostSecret to detect if something is a Spam blog. PostSecret should have lots of incoming links from high-quality sources. Well, maybe that’s not apparent scanning at the first of 28,000 incoming links, but let’s see… being a finalist in the 2005 Weblog Awards (and being around so long) probably breaks any Spam metric.
This seems like a sloppy shotgun approach (yes, indeed, “inherently fuzzy”)… like a 20% project gone horribly wrong and that should be suspended. Probably more important than this is a Spam blog scanner is something else like this is a cherished content blog scanner to ensure quality blogs never get blacklisted.
