Splog Generator

Not content with breaking new ground in my relationship, my throwaway Text Generator continues to generate stupidly large numbers of visitors, suggestions for new features (I need an It’s-A-Bloody-Joke email generator), and slightly strange enquiries about the source code.

A few weeks ago someone got in touch asking if I could create a new version that would generate text based on a set of words they feed in, then post the output to a weblog. It was supposedly for a silly art project and they couldn’t spend much on it, but something wasn’t right. Creative people writing about their projects have an openness and enthusiasm that was lacking in this case; it just didn’t quite fit.

So I did a bit of Googling, found out a bit more about them, then used those details to dig out more. I unearthed dozens of forum posts asking about various SEO techniques for gambling sites, eventually leading to a few mentioning, in essence, creating spam blogs full of keyword bait intended to lure in visitors via search engines. The swine wanted to harness the awesome TV-lyrics-generating power of my Text Generator for evil purposes!

I politely declined.

Wed 9th Nov 2005, 10:40pm GMT

Filed under: Rants and Grumbles, Search Engines, Software, Web, Weblogs