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April 01, 2004

Blog Trackbacks create digital Cartel
Posted by Jess in Geek Humor

April 1, 2004 – New York City, NY

Blog Trackbacking has taken a nasty, digital turn. It started when the owners of two blogs, "Life's a beach" and "Swimming with sharks" set their blog publishing programs to auto-ping trackback entries.

When the blog software discovered it did not need it’s user to post back to each other’s site, the bandwith started flying.

The owner of "Life's a beach" noticed one day that users were posting comments to a blog entry he did not remember writing. When asked why he did not immediately raise a red flag about the entry, he commented, "Well, the grammar and diction was actually much better than usual, so why complain? The amount of comments posted tripled overnight."

The topic of the blog was asking for advice on illegal activities such as money laundering, non-casino gambling, and drug shipping.

Said the owner of 'Swimming with sharks', "I think my blog saw frequent web use of the words 'syndicate' and 'traffic', and took it seriously. When I programmed the XML to syndicate itself, it was all over."

Over the next several months, the blog software pair decided to scrap the daily blogging, and instead went to join forces with other rogue blogs to create their own Wiki: ditch the stupid humans.

When asked why the owner of "Life's a beach" did not notice the deletion of the blog software on his own server, he replied, "Oh that stupid blog? I gave that up months ago. It got boring. Do I still have a web account? I’m not still paying for it, am I?"

Other blog users gave similar answers, not realizing their blog software had turned shady due to lack of interest anymore in returning to their own blogs. Many had not even gone back to their own to check to see if comments had been posted.

Said the President of Blogs R' Us, "This kind of thing happens every day. There's millions of abandoned blogs out there with their trackback auto-discovery still turned on. There just sitting there, watching, waiting. It’s only a matter of time…"

On a related note, the popular blog tracking service Daypop has changed it’s name to Datepop, after auto-trackback has romantically linked several blog owners who did not know they had so much in common until their auto-trackback discoveries were proving solid matches over the course of a year.

April 1, 2003

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