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From the Motley Fool and BrandWeek comes two updates on a favorite example of mine: Borders. Amazon had been handling Border’s e-commerce and web storefront, until Borders management ended the agreement in early 2007. Now there’s reports that Borders management is considering selling part or all of the company, after the company suspended its stock dividen and took on additional debt.

As both of the 2008 articles point out, Borders has plenty of competition. Warehouse stores sell bestsellers at steep discounts, and that keeps some potential Borders customers from making that extra trip. Barnes & Noble isn’t in great shape, but at least they’re competitive.

As I mentioned on 24 March 2008, the book publishing business is undergoing significant changes. So it’s not surprising that bookstores are struggling.

A post by WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg claims that 80 percent of the world’s blogs are actually spam blogs. Kevin Burton claims this number is as high as 90 percent, and that most of the spam blogs are hosted on Google’s free Blogger service.

I use a publicly-accessible blog to run my courses because it is easier for my students to access this site. I’ve tried hiding blog articles behind a password-protected walled garden like Moodle or WebCT in the past, and that was more trouble than the effort was worth.

I devote a couple of hours each day to this site, because it’s a great place to post the example, articles and links I discuss in my teaching and consulting engagements. Over the last year, I’ve learned a lot about how the splogosphere works.

The splog business model

Most of these splogs use a similar model: automated scripts search the Internet for keywords in legitimate blog posts and RSS feeds, such as my web site. There are between 8 and 14 million active blogs on the Internet, according to Matt’s estimates. The rest of the 100 million blogs are splogs that use software to scrape the first few lines of another blog’s articles, and then post an excerpt on the spam blog’s web site. Many spam blogs also try to leave trackbacks or spings on legitimate blogs, in an effort to draw visitors away from the real blogs.

Splog operators have thin profit margins, so they usually operate dozens or hundreds of sites. Sites earn revenue from keyword-based advertising links on their splog pages, as well as links to advertising-heavy web sites.

Not for human consumption

Most splog operators also try to get high rankings in search engines, so that Google users will see the splog articles before they find the original posts. Slogs are written for search engines, not real people, to read. Plagiarism Today ran one of the earliest articles about the splog business model, back in 2005. This Wired article came out a month earlier, and has some additional information.

Fighting the sploggers is easy

I’ve taken a few simple steps to keep sploggers from scraping my articles and leaving linkbacks to their sites, without wrecking my own web site in the process. It takes me about 10 minutes each week to manage these tools.

My comment forms require users to complete a reCAPTCHA verification form. This step eliminates almost all of the spam blogs that I’ve caught in my server logs. The only drawback with reCAPTCHA is that many mobile web users cannot leave comments.

I also run anti-splog software that uses an Internet-based list of known splogs to identify and quarantine spurious linkbacks.

Another piece of software searches for splog entries based on my articles. Occasionally, I leave comments on splog posts that are based on my articles, just to let them know I caught them.

My posts are also copyrighted under a Creative Commons license, as I discussed on 21 February 2008. I love it when real bloggers link back to my articles, as long as they give me credit for my writing.

From the AP and Consumerist: Enzyte is history.

On 21 September 2006, I reported on the US government’s investigation of Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals, the company that markets and sells Enzyte. The company’s advertisements featured a man named Smiling Bob, who lived a “better life” because of Enzyte. The advertisements included fake endorsements from medical doctors, and fake statistics from customer satisfaction surveys.

No one was satisfied

Enzyte was advertised as a natural male enhancement treatment. The Enzyte pills were little more than a placebo. The company made its money through credit card fraud, along with a steadfast refusal to process returns and cancellations from millions of customers.

It’s just the kind of business model that made the US Departments of Justice, Commerce and Health take notice.

Founder Steve Warshak, his mother, and others now face fines and jail time for their roles in the scam, as well as obstructing the investigation. This editorial in the Cincinnati Enquirer hails the ruling, and pleads for Smiling Bob’s demise.

Over a 100 years ago, Americans had another name for fake medications like Enzyte: patent medicine. See Wikipedia, QuackMedicine.com and the US National Library of Medicine for more information on this topic.

Here’s an interesting article about an academic study that affirms a popular belief – that eBay is a good place to find bargains. According to this summary on ZDnet, eBay shoppers saved an estimated US$8 billion dollars in 2004. The study by Wolfgang Jank and Galit Shmueli will be published in a future issue of the Journal of Information Systems Research.

Graduate students should make a habit of reading at least one peer-reviewed article a week, especially if their degree program requires a thesis or professional paper.

eBay’s next CEO, John Donahoe, hopes to bring sellers and buyers back to the service by offering better search options and a more secure marketplace, as I discussed on 23 January 2008.

As The Register points out, eBay’s lower listing fees are balanced by a hike in the final sales fees. While it will cost sellers list to relist an item, sellers will pay eBay more money if and when that item sells.

Yesterday I mentioned Sun’s acquistion of MySQL, a leading open source database company. BusinessWeek published an article about Oracle’s acquistion of middleware vendor BEA Systems. That deal has been in the works for a year, according to IT-Director.com.

Shane Schick’s follow-up on the Oracle deal is a nice overview of why CXOs should care about middleware. Middleware is a translation layer that helps data move between different software packages and computer systems. Without middleware, e-commerce just doesn’t work very well.

Many companies have to link heterogenous information systems within their value chain. Even more companies have to link their value chains with those of their suppliers and customers, which means even more heterogeneity.

Oracle has a healthy chunk of the financial services middleware market. BEA provides access to other sectors, including telecommunications,where Oracle has not been competitive.

However, Oracle will have to spend time pruning and consolidating the combined product lines. Time may not be on their side, given the growing signs of economic recession in North America.

Amidst all of these developments, we should not forget that middleware and database software are important parts of data security. Cory Doctorow has described his radical view that data breaches are as bad as toxic waste and nuclear accidents. He has a good point – the effects might last for decades, and the companies that leaked the data might not bear the true costs.