MEDIA BLOG - THE LACK OF OBJECTIVITY IN THE NEWS

Chris Ulbrich helps propagate blog spam

In a another example of poor journalism, Wired writer Chris Ulbrich tells less than half the story. In Spammers Clog Up the Blogs, Ulbrich addresses the problem of blog spam - the increasing trend of spammers to spam blog comments with links. Ulbrich talks about how easy it is for spammers to target Movable Type weblogs, due to the open nature of the comments system.

But Ulbrich did not mention a single tool for fighting the problem - except Movable Type's IP banning tool, which Ulbrich is quick to describe as "a restriction spammers can easily avoid". What makes this even worse is that Jay Allen, the creator of MT-Blacklist, a new tool for combatting blog spam, is quoted in the article. So Ulbrich knew of this great tool, but didn't even reference it. The closest he comes is in quoting Allen "I realized that day that we were facing a new predator in the jungle, and if we didn't adapt -- and quickly -- it would be having us for dinner" - which is not very close, as you can see.

It gets even worse. It turns out that Ulbrich told Allen that he would link to the MT-Blacklist home page in the article. Not only did Ulbrich not link to the page, he didn't mention MT-Blacklist at all. He didn't even mention that Allen was working on a solution to the problem! Ulrich's interview with Allen, however, centered around MT-Blacklist - you can read the whole interview here.

Setting Ulbrich's dishonesty aside for a moment, his intentional omission of any tool that could help bloggers combat the problem is tantamount to helping and encouraging the spread of blog spam. He made sure to describe how easy it is for spammers to target MT blogs - I wonder how many more spammers will enter the arena after reading Ulbrich's article?

Chris Ulbrich should be ashamed of himself.

Update: Jay Allen makes a good point that that Wired editors may be to blame for the omissions in this article. I should have been more clear about that above. That said, it is the author's name that is attributed to the article - and authors do need to take responsibility for their published works.

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