What is the point of these sites?
Just a quick early morning moan.
Can anyone tell me what is the point of these aggregator blogs which have appeared in the last three months. Most of them seem to be set up in Wordpress and are using some kind of search software – probably Google or Technorati – to automatically aggregate based on key words / categories. In a few cases there does seem to be some human intervention but most of them are just preprogrammed to write soemthing like “xxx wrote an interesting post yesterday”. And of course being reasonably legitimate – apart from the ‘Flash Gordon’ factor – they get past my sp[am filter and appear as trackbacks on the blog. A lot are targeting ‘tech posts’ and a not inconsiderable number are after things like e-Portfolios.
I fail to see the point – what added value do these sites provide. Or do their owners think they will get rich from Google ads? In their dreams. This is just another layer of spam.
Yes, I’ve had a lot of those too … and they never know that it’s “Emma” who posted the message. I’ve had that many different names from them.
There are some WordPress plugins that let you do that, apparently … I’d been trying to find such a plugin, not because of an undying urge to spam, but when Eduspaces looked like it was dying … I’d wanted to know if it was possible to embed one post within another blog as if it was the original – as Elgg lets you. Seems you can in WordPress, but you have to search for “spam” plugins, rather than “Embed RSS feeds” which is what I’d tried.
Askimet seems to do a reasonable job of stopping the trackbacks for me.
It’s all about SEO. They might get some money from the ads, but that’s just a bonus. What they want to do is to propel links to benefit from association.