A few days back, a trackback was caught and held as a prisoner by Akismet. Since this is the first time I saw a trackback caught by Akismet, I spent a few minutes visiting the blog that sent the trackback.

Apparently the blog is indeed a splog. Basically it just grabbed the first 100s words from the blog post and published it there. A link to the original article also added at the end of the post. Quickly I judged the comment as a trackback from splog which the punishment is damnation to nothingness a.k.a. deletion. But after I clicked the Delete button, I pondered whether I judged fairly or not.

When I looked that blog for the second time, that blog actually never steal any content. It grabbed some words from the post, the post writer name also mentioned there, as well as the originated blog. It looks more like a blog aggregator than a splog.

To think of it, if we stripped out the commenting and digging/burying from Digg and replaced the user submitted summary into machine generated one, I think Digg will not stand out that far from the splog that sent me a trackback.

So does this mean we can make a splog, add few widgets, maybe build a mini community, and finally ‘legally’ called it a blog aggregator?