Wednesday, December 29, 2004

Stupid Itchy Fake Blogs 

Weird, I just typed 'retinitis pigmentosa' into Technorati to see who else is blogging about RP. The first page of results contained mostly blog entries headed 'Foundation Fighting Blindness' and a description of that organisation. Each blog referring to the FFB actually linked to a page called 'injury attorney: information about blindness'. Each blog I checked out was hosted at Blogspot, used the same design template and was named after the supposed author - for example, Deanne Ferris's blog or Joe Blogg's blog. Each profile I checked gave the number of posts as n/a. The blogs gave information about other organisations only to link to injury attorney's site about that organisation or a related topic. Only the links didn't work for me in Opera. I hope I'm not an idiot who now has a virus/trojan/some other awful problem with her computer. Via J-Walk Blogs entry 'Ads In Blogs' I discovered that someone mentioned this in a comment to the article 'The revolution will be commercialized' (kottke.org, 19 October 2004).

The fake blogs make it difficult to find actual blogs discussing subjects of interest, at least using Technorati. They also use the names of real, in this case non-profit, organisations such as the Foundation Fighting Blindness to misdirect web surfers. And it means my genuine blog doesn't rank very well!

If I remember, I may look into this a bit more later.

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