Is it just me, or does anyone else see a similarity between link-spammers, who say our websites are open and therefore ergo to wit fair game for their profiteering, and those who, with no actual business or stake in the game, set themselves as automated pundit aggregators of a topic where they add no actual value, but effortlessly cash in on topical quirks of the AdSense? It's yet another new question in the breakdown of the web, what it really means to have google juice ...

... Right now asbestos reform and asbestos related litigation is on fire. Lawyers are paying anywhere from $15-100 per click through on Google ads. The second part of this big experiment is to see if I can capture some of that click through revenue while still providing a somewhat valid service to people who might arrive by search results.
[ via Michael Buffington ]

And he just so happened to choose 'asbestos' as his new hobby topic? Ok ...

So, now, disclosure time: I too have experimented in automated blog aggregator portal sites, and my knowledge management aggregator is one of my most popular pages. But in my case, I've researched a list of blogs and even written scrape-scripts to expand the list, and that is my value-add into the the great metadata that is meat for the google-juice. What's more, I didn't do it for the ads, but because I actually needed some means to keep tabs on KM and although I've grown apart from this particular aggregate (and most of the others on that site) people read those pages so I let them be. In all, I auto-aggregate several hundred RSS feeds either as they ship or scraped by me or someone else, sifted into about 20 topics all of which are (were) in some way related to who I am, where I am, and what I do (did).

Besides being initially for my own personal/business info-tracking reconnaissance purposes and now not so much so, I'm still quasi-semi-professionally (ha ha) interested in how web knowledge flows, and thus still keep an eye and interest in the specific topic of How do these aggregates and sidebars affect site click-throughs and the discovery of new, topically adjacent material?, which seems to me a noble cause despite that no one on this planet is the least interested in paying for any such results.

My aggregates are also all unique collections, adding the metadata that sites X and Y are, in this author's view, related by the topical category, and that's value, it's bridging bubbles, helping people find stuff.

But here in Michael's case ... we have news auto-culled from what Google already aggregates, returning the same results as anyone's query into a new page format ... what, exactly, do these folded-back links tell us about any of the rebroadcast results? Is it only telling us there's cash to be made jamming top-ranks of any hot-topic Google result? Or is there something I'm missing ...

I suspect that if Asbestos News does well, I'll probably try to find another hotbed topic to blog on, and will continue to spawn what I'll call, with trepidation, "topical news aggregator blogs" until the concept stops working.

... or stops paying? ... To be fair, Michael set this out as an experiment, and judging from the comments he's attracted, the experiment may not be quite as lucrative as he'd hoped; I see the referenced vioxx-recall-blog is also MIA with some commenters suggesting that perhaps the crest of the asbestos wave has long since past.

And I'm not sure what to say about the ethics (as if that mattered) but I think we're on the cusp of a new kind of spammish profiteer occupation that we might call AdSense Trolling, or perhaps a gentler monicker of Tag Farming. Rules are simple: Pick any tag you think will run the best race, then slap up a quick page to trawl the AdSense. Lather, rinse, repeat.