...biotics. The warnings tell us that the bugs they[drugs] were designed to kill have been mutating into what arenow called Super Bugs, as the result of developing an immunityto the drugs. The misuse/ over use of these drugs hasmade them ineffective in fighting disease. The drug companiesdon't care, because a) they've made billions of dollarsselling these drugs, and b) they will make billions moreon the drugs they plan to develop to fight the Super Bugs. It isa win-win situation...

... for them. What does this have todo with marketing? Quite a bit, actually. For years,webmasters would have to wait anywhere from 6 weeks to 6 monthsto have a web site indexed by Google, Yahoo, or MSN, unless theywanted to pay the big bucks to get spidered right away. Thesubmission process, when done manually, was a very lengthy,tedious chore. So, we created auto submitters to do the work forus. However, it still took forever, in cyber-speak, to getlisted. Then came new systems to get ranked higher withthe search engines. The age of SEO was born, and webmasters gotto optimizing their sites to get higher rankings, but still thewait for indexing remained slow. Then cameblogging. It took awhile to catch on, but onceeveryone discovered that a blog was more attractive to thespider bots, they began popping up everywhere. Whyare blogs more quickly crawled and indexed by searchengines? Because of pinging. Blogs, RSS feeds inparticular, have the capability to announce themselves to thesearch engines. In essence, a blog ping tells the searchengines, "Hey! Look at me! I have something new to show you!"Static web sites can't do that and have to wait for their turnduring the next crawl. In the beginning, this was anawesome thing. If you were technically gifted, and could handlethe scripting, you could install a blog on your site andping blog directories like weblogs.com, every time youupdated your content. The alternative was to set up your blogthrough a third party, and let them handle the technical stufffor you, or you could visit ping services like ping-o-matic, andmanually ping the servers yourself. It didn'ttake the gurus long to find software developers who could createa short cut to all of this and the blog and pingcontroversy was born. Software to auto submit your blogto the search engines. Along with the blog and pingsoftware, they also created programs that would allow anyone tovirtually steal content from other sites and place it on theblog owners' sites, programs to auto submit comments tolegitimate blogs, and of course programs that generate spam blogs, which are nothing but pages ofkeywords, used to grab search engine attention away from thelegitimate informational blogs, while allowing theblogger the opportunity to cash in on Google Adsense and otherpay-per-click programs. If you take a look at weblogs.comyou will find more and more blog listings that resemble:http://blah.blah.blah.com FREE INFO. Click through to thoseblogs and you'll find pages full of CRAP! Weblogs.comaverages about 2 million pings per day. That is a lot of pings,and that number continues to grow. The demand on their serverwas so masive, that they were not able to keep up with theinflux. That challenge has apparently been met with a solution.VeriSign has recently purchased weblogs.com from Scripting NewsInc. for a tidy sum of $2.3 million in CASH! This means thatweblogs.com will now have greater resources with which toprovide a more stable and reliable communicationsinfrastructure. Why am I going on about weblogs.com?Because Google uses weblogs.com for it's listings.Freely submitted data is easily abused. Like FFA sites, pingsites will lose their advantage as a result of all thisspamming. Companies like Google are not interested infiltering spam from content, and will eventually ignore thepings and things, rendering them useless. Very much likethe antibiotics vs the Super Bugs. So what happens whensomething becomes ineffective? It dies. Google has already begunto fight back against blog spam of other flavors. It willjust be a matter of time before they ban blogs alltogether.All the money spent on blogging and pingingwill have been for nothing, because it will no longer work. Theprogram pushers don't care, because they've made buckets ofmoney, and they've already been working on their next new toolto soak John Q for. Just take a look at the FFA and safelist businesses. How effective are they now? Freely submitteddata abused to the point of no return. Copyright © 2005 The Trii-Zine Ezinewww.ezines1.com TrinaL.C. Schiller : About the Author http://www.trinaschiller.ws Keywords: blog, ping, blog spam, weblogs