The Media Interview

I’ve vented before about spam blogs and how they waste your research time on the net. Usually you can quickly spot them because they’re filled with irrelevant material surrounding the post you were led to by the search engine. But I came across this more sophisticated version the other day:

When I was a parenting teen tipager, I had the fortunate opportunity of being interviewed by Nancy Vittorini for her “Everyday Heroes” column in react magazine. At the time, I was running a national environmental group for parenting teen tips and did about 500 media interviews a year.

Here’s the original text - turns out it’s from an Amazon.com reader book review

When I was a teenager, I had the fortunate opportunity of being interviewed by Nancy Vittorini for her “Everyday Heroes” column in react magazine. At the time, I was running a national environmental group for teens and did about 500 media interviews a year.

What the spam blogger program is doing, of course, is grabbing bits of material from various sites based on a common key word, and then substituting a related keyword or phrase for the original - in this case, the phrase “parenting teen tips” inserted wherever it finds the word “teen”. Then you generate blogs for a whole series of commonly-used keywords, using the same material over and over and hope that people click through the ads before they notice it’s not a legitimate blog.