Why it surprises Yahoo’s Jeremy Zawodny that an exploit in newly acquired MyBlogLog is already being exploited by marketers and seo’s is beyond me. The fact that Andy Beal and quite a number of other folks are using MBL to spam blogging communities is just the inevitable consequence of the service going mainstream. Opportunities are exploited, fact of life.
Jeremy, hitting Andy’s reputation will sort him out for sure, but you can’t do it to everyone — time to start plugging holes in the MBL system wouldn’t you say?
2 thoughts on “MyBlogLog getting Spammed? No Shit Sherlock…”
Whether or not it is specifically in “the rules”, and whether or not it was blessed with the holy MBL water from Scott Rafer, it IS an advertisement, and it IS an exploit of the system.
It’s all very well for Andy to argue technical details and interpreations, but if it looks like and ad, and walks like an ad….
I think Jeremy was right, if a little rash.
I know Andy to be a stand up guy, but it doesnt make ads in MBL less annoying.
Read the comments on Jeremy’s blog and especially the back-n-forth between Andy and Jeremy. Interesting, and I think Jeremy made several key mistakes (but is honest enough to admit it):
1) Calling Andy out in public without discussing his issues via email first – I think when you’re dealing with high profile people it’s smart to discuss matters via email and THEN post about it online. Not as much fun, yes, but smarter. Jeremy could still have called Andy out for spamming, but he probably would have gotten his facts straight.
2) There are far better examples of spammers than Andy. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything from Andy that even remotely encourages spamming, and while Jeremy may not care about reputations he might have wanted to check on whether Andy really is a ‘spammer’ or not.
There are more, but it’s funny to see how things turned against Jeremy in his comments. A little bit of patience and common sense would have avoided the mess.
And Nick, I don’t think MBL’s decision to allow people to upload ‘avatars’ is an exploit, nor is it a ‘hole’ that requires plugging. Spammers will be spammers, you can’t stop them, you just have to kill them
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