Thursday, September 15, 2005

MIT Advertising Lab Blogger Hacks A Hack

This is a great post from the MIT Advertising Lab blog. The blogger, unnamed, found a site that had ripped off his content and blatantly used it for the sole purpose of making a few bucks off of AdSense on Yet Another Spam Blog. But the MIT blogger used his wits to refresh the offending blog's page every 5 seconds so as to dilute the click to views ratio of the AdSense ads and get the site banned from AdSense.

Admittedly our MIT AdLab blogger knows someone can do the same thing to him without him being able to do a thing about it, but in his own words...

"oh well, I'll take solace in being original."

I'm all about someone using a simple hack like the automated url refresher tool to take down a spammer, especially since the person shared their hack with all of us for our enjoyment and enrichment.

I also like the fact that this hack can be performed by any non-technical do-gooder out there that wants to take a bite out of spam. No matter how many spam blogs are out there, there will never be more spam blogs than there are users on the internet. So perhaps we should organize the Take A Bite Out Of Spam Blogs campaign and equip all the righteous internet users with a tool that allows them to report the spam blog [other than just spam blogs on a single network like blogger] and unleash a url-refreshing mechanism located on a server grid pretty cheaply.

Insert Dr. Evil laugh here.

From the original MIT blog...

I felt special yesterday. It was the first time someone has ripped my blog's content and tried to use it for personal gain by pasting it on a different page surrounded by AdSense ads. Somehow it always happens to the big guys, but not to your regular rank-and-file blogmonkey. But now I felt flattered - the guys even pasted "MIT Advertising Lab" across their clone. Since I don't publish a whole lot of original thinking and rely mostly on re-blogging other people's work, seeing my own contribution's value in filtering and organizing instead of production, I normally wouldn't mind a whole lot. I got peeved, though, because I didn't get a single courtesy link back from the guys, and decided to let them know they needed to play nice.

Posted By Jason Dowdell at 05:12 PM
Permanent Link: MIT Advertising Lab Blogger Hacks A Hack | Comments (0)

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