A Splog???

Well, you learn something new everyday.

I showed several of my more savvy friends a list of "profitable blogs" and they shared the following insights with me:

Viv:
I suppose there are a couple of models of blogging for profit. There is the
Instapundit thing, where you gain a huge following and put ads up, which is
what you are talking about. Then there is the pyramid scheme model, which
seems to be what [they are] advocating.

The difference is that people read Instapundit intentionally and the other
method looks more like high view count due to google-bombing.


Phelps:
You might have stumbled onto a splog -- a spam blog. They scrape stories
(automatically sometimes) from other places and intersperse them with the
spam, so that they get a higher google rank (from the scraped stories) for
the spam and search hits. I had one a couple of years ago that was scraping
my entire feed.


I don't think I actually was following a splog. But I do see it as more of the pyramid-type of blogging. And I suppose that's okay for some folks. Though I must admit that many of my friends and I mostly share the opinion of my friend Irix:

Sounds dirty and dishonourable to me, only a slightly better way to earn your living than email spamming. Of course, I may be not in a position to judge, with my cushy job and opportunity to leech on the employer's resources, I don't have to struggle to make ends meet.

Still, leave it to my best friend to send the definitive reply to the whole situation:

"I don't think that list is a good representation of the people who "quit" working. I think it's a good representation of people who are bragging about it.

The sites I frequent are interesting and engaging; I don't have a lot of time to waste on a blog that tells me how to waste less time.

But hey, I see no harm in putting up your wishlist. It's not like you're out there pursuing the almighty dollar."


So, with that advice, here is Comic Siren's Little Wishlist.

And thank you for reading this blog.