The title of this post is of course a reference to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” in the Sherlock Holmes story The Silver Blaze. The curious incident in this case is the lack of spam blogs on WordPress.com.
The incident is analyzed by Jonathan Bailey at his Plagiarism Today blog. He finds the lack of spam blogs at WordPress.com remarkable, given that the service is free. He reports three mechanisms for keeping it free of spam blogs. One is its use of Akismet. A second is its banning of ads, including AdSense, from blogs hosted there. A third is simple vigilance against spam.
Notes: Plagiarism Today isn’t hosted at WordPress.com, although it is a WordPress blog. This blog is a WordPress.com blog, although it has a .org URI; that’s because of domain mapping, one of the premium services for which WordPress.com charges. I saw Jonathan’s post via Toni’s.
I use WordPress and Akisment has singlehandedly saved my sanity.
I think the banning of adsense on blogs can only help improve the quality of what is written – you have no idea how many machine generated blogs I trawl through trying to find real people….