Blog Scams: Blog Scams Are a Growing Business

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While I can excuse those who overhype their Plugins, Themes, and contests on their blog, I have a hard time forgiving those who use their blogs as scams. As the blog platform becomes more ubiquitous and easier to use with a lot of automatic content generating tools and comment and trackback spam tools, blogs are being used more and more for the dark side of blogging.

In The Thin Line Between Legitimate Blog Models and Scams, Weblog Scout writes that there is a think line between a scan and legitimate blog model as scammers tend to use the same tools as legit blogs do, such as autoblogging WordPress Plugins, auto-pings, mass site submission tools, and feed scrapers: [Read more…]

Weblogs Inc blogs suffer major outage

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A highly unusual occurrence, the entire Weblogs Inc blog network is down, and has been for several hours. I noticed it first thing this morning UK time, when I tried to check in to Engadget, but it seems it’s affecting the entire Weblogs empire.

It’s uncommon for an entire network to go down for so long, though individual sites (usually on smaller networks) do have problems from time to time, either due to spikes in traffic (Steve Jobs keynote, anyone?) or technical problems.

I haven’t looked far, but I haven’t seen any gloating about the situation — though I’m sure some are capitalising on the situation and benefiting from it, if not publicly. Echoing Pete Cashmore’s words, if it had to happen at all, then a West Coast Sunday night isn’t a disastrous time for it to go down — that is, unless all of AOL’s web engineers are tucked up in bed? Perhaps they’re reading Chris’s post on what do do when your blog goes down.

At time of writing, a number of sites are behaving erratically. Engadget came and went, so the problems may not be fully solved yet. At least the news is still being written, even if we can’t read it.

(Via Mashable)