I am thankful for their spam comments. They make me feel like a celebrity.

One of my friends was complaining the other day about how the spam comments are eating up her do-follow blog alive. She was manually moderating all the comments because of this issue, and she was getting frustrated more and more, day by day, as her spam blocker didn’t seem to adopt to the rapidly evolving spam comments.

Are you suffering from the same issue? They say the best way to get over mounting frustration is to develop some kind of appreciation for the cause of the frustration itself. So, I can try and make you develop some kind of appreciation towards spam.

I heard some celebrity(can’t remember who), sometime ago on MTV, saying that she’s not worried about paparazzi following her around and would be more worried if they didn’t follow her around. Why? According to her, paparazzi are the single most influential external aspect that could affect a celebrity’s star-power. And thinking about that rather controversial statement, I don’t think she got it wrong.

Let’s look at the facts. A paparazzi can put a celebrity in the headlines and make him/her the center of attention whenever he/she wants. May it be negative or positive, the celebrity is in the headlines. No paparazzi, not much headlines. Not much headlines mean declining popularity. More popularity, more paparazzi.

And this is probably the same relationship that spam and blogs share.

If your blog is popular, you get more spam comments. In other words, it means that, when you get more spam comments, that’s an indication that your blog is very popular. Although spam is a huge issue, it can be easily eradicated by the use of a spam blocker such as Akismet for WordPress or manually moderating all your comments., much like celebrities hiring security personnel to keep the annoying paparazzi away from them.

Once in a while, security will beat down an innocent fan or two mistakenly; much like your spam blocker catching non-spam comments mistakenly. So keeping your eyes peeled both ways would not hurt.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying spam is a good thing. It’s just a yardstick to measure your blog’s popularity. Blogs are not dependent on spam, although spam, to a certain extent is dependent on blogs. Much like celebrities and paparazzi, although celebrities are somewhat dependent on paparazzi, unlike blogs.

This is what I told my friend. And that’s what inspired me to do this post. I don’t suffer that much from spam comments; but I certainly do appreciate their paparazzi-like behavior:) They make me feel that they want a piece off my blog’s popularity. Is it the same with you?