Detecting Human-Posted Spam is Hard

We have definitely seen this increase in human-posted spam here at ReadWriteWeb over the last two years or so. While early comment spam was easily detectable because it had nothing to do with the actual post, we now have to take a closer look at all the links our commenters use in their personal profiles in order to weed out the spammers. Often, comments that look perfectly legit will include a link to a Viagra or SEO site in the profile link.

What About Regular Spam?

Besides the rise of human-powered spam, traditional spam is still going strong as well. Akismet notes that "old-fashioned" pill, porn and malware spam still tends to originate from Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation. Spammers there still operate huge networks of malware-infected machines that run spambots.

According to Akismet, the number of fake blog networks on services like Blogspot, Weebly, Tumblr, Ning and WordPress is also becoming more frequent and more highly organized. Instead of just abusing other people's blogs, these spammers just create their own blog networks.

Other forms of blog-related spam that are on the rise are auto-blog pingbacks from people using auto-blogging plugins (mostly for WordPress sites), as well as hijacked blogs and wikis.

From Porn and Pills to Pet Food and Roofing

Akismet also notes that while early blog spammers used to focus on the traditional (and highly lucrative) niches around pornography, pills and malware, today's spammers are often more interested in search engine optimization than hawking fake Viagra. Because of this, modern blog spam often includes links to "dentists, roofing and pet food."

Automattic CEO Toni Schneider, who recently won the Crunchie award for best start-up CEO, said in a blog post that the funding will help Automattic attain two goals. "One was to put enough money in the bank to have financial security for years to come," he wrote. "Another was to invest more aggressively into our 'other' products and services (other than WordPress) like Akismet, Gravatar, and bbPress."

But as we said, the most intriguing part of the news is the strategic investment by the New York Times Co. Like many large news organizations, the Times Co. utilizes Wordpress to power its blogs. As we noted, earlier this week the newspaper ran two stories that were approbative toward tools like blogs that are traditionally used by citizen journalists. Meanwhile, the paper's blogs are very successful -- their technology blog, "Bits," currently sits at #17 on the Techmeme Leaderboard (the paper is #3 -- any many of the stories attributed to the flagship are by Bits authors), while their political blog, "The Caucus," is #15 on Memeorandum (the paper is #1).

With the paper receiving so much web attention from blogging, it probably can't hurt to get cozy with the provider of their blog platform. According to Schneider, the paper has the dual goals of "[expanding] their existing WordPress blogging infrastructure and to create new ways of connecting WordPress bloggers with the New York Times and its readers."

The latter bit makes me wonder if the Times is planning to allow readers to set up blogs on the paper's web site -- similar to how The Huffington Post or DailyKos work. Or it could mean that the paper will be looking at ways to syndicate content from outside bloggers who are using the Wordpress platform -- similar to the way Reuters and USA Today syndicate bloggers via BlogBurst.

Either way, it sounds like the fruits of this investment may lead to an opportunity for broader syndication for long tail bloggers. Whatever the NYT has in mind for its Wordpress tie-up, it is certainly an interesting direction for one of America's oldest and most respected daily newspapers, and a further affirmation of blogging's use in legitimate journalism.

Update: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that True Ventures led the round. However, Polaris Ventures provided $20 million of the $29.5 million raised in this funding round.