MyBlogLog, another Community for Spammers?

I have joined MyBlogLog a while back. I found it a great way to communicate with other bloggers and let them know that I exist in the blogosphere. Communicating with others and helping other is a great feeling. Even learning from other blogs, what users are reading and what they talk about.

Blogs are a great way to get in contact with someone from another location whether it be within your own US state or across the oceans. Each blog you have or website has its own personal page, as well as you the author as well. Your profile page can have additional information about you, a list of your MyBlogLog community members, a list of recent visitors, and a link back to your website. In essence, the MyBlogLog profile page is a place for you to further attract the attention of the visitor.

MyBlogLog.com is a perfect example of how social media sites can generate website traffic and keep generating traffic for a long time to come. With a free member account, MyBlogLog provides a small snippet of code called a widget that you place on your website or blog.

Lately MyBlogLog has upgraded or done some maintenance on their website. They added a special feature called tags. These tags let users leave a tag on your blog. This tagging system within MyBlogLog lets users tag blogs with keywords that can identify what specific blogs are all about.

I have noticed messages being just sent saying to join their feed, check this special offer, etc. MyBlogLog has some type of control where they only allow 15 messages perday, and if they suspect you of spamming I believe they block all messages by you, which means no more commenting on other blogs.

With the upgrade and if authors feel they are being spammed, they can leave a tag on a user with the tag "schmoe." This stops spammers right in their tracks. Once they have been tagged they are unable to leave comments or messages to authors. This is a great way to stop spammers on MyBlogLog, but if you are tagged as a "schmoe" and not really spamming what are the rules against that?

After witnessing this I actually did a BlogSearch on Google, and found some other post about MyBlogLog being spammy. Here are what other blogs have to say.

Marketing Pilgrim states:

Since when did social media optimization become spam? Isn’t MyBlogLog itself nothing but a network to optimize connections between social media sites? I mean really, how successful does MBL expect to be, if it doesn’t want the participation of those that know the value of building a social network for their site?

NinetySevethFloor says:

It seems that MyBlogLog forgot that the “SchMoes” are the ones that pushed their product, they were around for a while with a relatively small user base...

Marketing Hipster has a really good input on the basis of spammers on MyBlogLog:

I thought that I would give them a hand so they might actually stop putting the cart before the horse and layout what I consider to be spam on MyBlogLog.

1. A blog that does not have any original content of their own. If a blog is just pulling content from other blogs and not adding any of their own content and are just doing this so they can have five layers of Google Adsense ads on their site. That be spam!
2. Any MBL member who signs up for a community and then posts a message on that users community which says something like, “Hey, great blog. Come check out my blog at www.ineedattention.com”. (Oh by the way MBL, I see the spam link for messages is still just a mailto.) Definitely spam..
3. Any member that has a scantly clad woman as it’s community picture. This is spam except if the blog is about scantly clad women then it is just fine.
4. A member that just goes out and joins communities and becomes contacts with hundreds of other users without having any interest in their blogs. Spammer…

Any popular social network seems to get spam no matter what, whether its comments, friend requests, sending messages, etc. The fact that there are so many users now that are into social networking, spammers or marketers are trying to find a way to filter all that FREE traffic and potential sales.

As we approach Web 2.0, so many users like to communicate with others to get a better idea, to learn a new technique, provide answers, meet new people, etc. This new form of networking can become annoying soon if spammers out there just want to get a measly 100 new users to their blog or website by forms of annoyance.

Social communities are a main target of spammers; they count on the millions of users on that site and attempt to get their attention by spamming. As for MyBlogLog they are controlling spam by means of its users in their community. With the power of its bloggers spam can be controlled within the community. As we enter the blogosphere and Web 2.0, we as bloggers help each other maintain a unity among true bloggers and producing useful and unique information.