Update:
Just to be explicitly clear, I am not now, and have never been, an email spammer, a blog comment spammer, or any other kind of spammer other than what I describe in this post. I originally created the site described here as an experiment in trying to auto-populate a supposed high-value keyword website with posts to see if it would make any money. That experiement worked, but the resulting site (which I would describe as a spam blog or splog or whatever you want to call it) was not very interesting, and I realized that it was a BAD THING to keep it around, even if it did make a whole $10.00. I appologize, I’m sorry, I don’t want the kittens to die.

This is the abbreviated version of my attempted and somewhat misguided career as a blog spammer. NOT a blog comment spammer, no way. This was all about creating a WordPress site, then filling it with content that didn’t add really any value to the Internet.

But tonight, I shut the blog down and made this page instead:
All About Mesothelioma – Information about mesothelioma and possible treatment options.

Isn’t this still spam? Well, yes, and yes/no. I would say it is reformed spam. Maybe. It is really just aggregating entries from around the blogosphere (much like Technorati and a bunch of other sites do).

The story:
I had WordPress auto feeding on a number of feeds. Over the course of a little over a year, the site collected over 66k posts all based on the keyword mesothelioma. This really offered nothing interesting or good to the internet, just basically your typical spam blog I guess. Then, after feeling guilty after reading about the ping server problem with spamming blogs, I turned off the ping notification. It was never my intention to harm anyone or anything. More like, see if I could make a quick buck.

Finally tonight I killed the WordPress part of the site. It was hammering the server (although the hardware problem we had yesterday was a different issue) but churning through 66k of posts was killing mysql on our VPS. So, I made this page to go there instead. Doesn’t hit the database, just sits there, feeding on Google’s news feed and displaying Google ads.

Why mesothelioma, you ask? Just Google for “mesothelioma high value keyword” and you’ll see why. If you think you’d want to give it shot for yourself, though, you might not want to waste your time.

This is approximately what I actually made between February 12, 2004 – October 20, 2005: ~$10.00 total, based on around a total of 760 impressions and ~18 clicks. Being a little vague to try to comply with Google’s TOS for Adsense.

So. I would say, in addition to feeling much better about not having the sites up, I feel like I can say that overall, my wordpress spamming blog career did not actually amount to anything worth trying again. Will I leave this site up as-is now (basically 1 index.php page with some RSS feeds dumping into it)? Yes, mostly to see if it makes any difference now.

Anyways, the lesson that I learned and you should too: don’t spam.

God kills a kitten every time you do.