Popurls and Trackback Spam

Lately I’ve been noticing that many of the popular posts around the web that get Dugg, Slashdotted or otherwise go viral, all seem to end up with one thing in common. The following trackback -

story has entered the popular today section on popurls.com…

The first time I saw the popurls site was in one of my news feeds. I checked it out briefly and it looked alright, but I didn’t have any reason to use it over my current aggregation services. I closed the tab and thought I had seen the last of it. I was wrong.

It started appearing everywhere in the form of genuine grade A spam! Now it’s one thing to launch a service and market the hell out of it. Just do it the usual way by begging techcrunch to write about you or jumping in a pool with your clothes on for digg’s. Don’t do it by spamming more than 11,000 times! By doing so, you have just put yourself on the same level as viagra and porn. Although given the numbers those two things pull, maybe that’s not such a bad place to be. Hmm…

Even though I think it should be strictly opt-in, I went searching on their site for a way to opt out of this nonsense. Guess what? There isn’t one.

Anyway, it got me to thinking. What qualifies a comment as spam? Is it merely the content itself or the perceived usefulness of that content to a publications readership? All I can tell you is that popurls is useless to me as both a blog consumer and now a publisher as well.