Welcome to Gahtan’s Technology and Internet Law Blog

Blogger/Blogspot seems to be doing a better job this year in pulling down fake blogs (meaning, blogs that just copy random text from other blogs or from websites for the sole purpose of displaying paid placement ads). However, I’ve noticed that while these fake blogs may have been suspended or removed, their data is not also pulled out of Google’s Blog Search database. Better coordination needs to happen in order to improve the search results from Blog Search. There’s not reason why Blog Search should be displaying hits for a blog that was taken down months ago. Come on Google!

Charles C. Mann writes in Wired about the growing problem of spam blogs. He reviews a number of techniques, suggested by David Sifry, founder of Technorati, of identifying potential splogs. These include:

Well, let me suggest another potential technique, one that would be very easy for the pay-per-click firms such as Google and Yahoo to implement.

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A California appeals courts has ruled that First Amendment protections apply to Internet reporting. According to the New York Times:

The three-judge panel in San Jose overturned a trial court’s ruling last year that to protect its trade secrets, Apple was entitled to know the source of leaked data published online. The appeals court also ruled that a subpoena issued by Apple to obtain electronic communications and materials from an Internet service provider was unenforceable.

Wired News reports on the Great MySpace Crackdown of ‘06.

MySpace’s rapid transformation into the largest community of teens and twenty-somethings in history made a backlash perhaps inevitable. In the three years since its launch, MySpace has gathered over 57 million registered users …

Concerns over the site fall generally into two categories: unease over the type of content teens are posting, and fear of the type of people they’re meeting.

School teachers and administrators are sending home warnings to parents while some schools are now blocking access from their systems.

I’ve been using My Yahoo! for some time now as my blog news aggregator. A new and very useful feature appears to have been added. When the mouse pointer is moved over an item, a popup appears to display the first sentence or two from the story. A great addition that will help identify whether a particular item is worth clicking.

David Fraser writes about potential legal conflicts for bloggers. He has also issued an invitation to other legal bloggers to initiate a discussion on the subject.

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