There's some controversy going on regarding MovableType and its founder, Matt Mullenweg. Some people have asked me to explain what that's all about, so that's what this blog entry is all about.

MovableType is an open-source program that helps you set up your own blog. Basically, you download it, do some installation crap, and presto, you've got an instant blog. It's similar to WordPress, if you've heard of that one, but different from Blogger or LiveJournal in that these later two things are services that you sign up for, rather than software that you download and setup yourself.

By default, when every MovableType blog has a link that points to the official MovableType homepage. This is mainly in the form of fineprint near the bottom of the blog saying something like "Powered by MovableType". Because there are probably several thousands, if not millions of blogs powered by MovableType, the MovableType homepage has a very high GoogleRank (recall my discussion of how GoogleRank works).

Google also offers a service called "AdSense". Since Google already tries to detect the "topic" of a website (so that it can produce accurate search results), the geniuses at Google said "Hey, we can use that data to serve targetted ads!" The logic being that if your website is about computers, then most people who read your site are probably interested in computers, so ads about computer stuff will catch more attention than purely random ads. So companies pay money to Google to have Google distribute the companies ads, and Google pays webmasters to let google display ads on the webmasters pages.

Now some companies are desperate to sell ads to Google, but very few webmasters have pages on the topic of the ad. One famous such topic is "mesothelioma", which reportedly has a payout of $84.08 per click. Meaning if you get an ad on your blog about mesothelioma, and someone clicks on that ad, Google will pay you $84 (of course, this probably doesn't work anymore, since once word got out, everyone started making pages on mesothelioma). The point is, nowadays, some people blog on topics not because they care about the topic, but because the topics pay well on AdSense. There's a whole industry forming behind writing articles on high-paying AdSense topics, and I've seen job postings asking for writers to write articles on these topics (probably hoping to ensnare a naive writer who doesn't know about this AdSense trick).

Anyway, there's this company called "Hot Nacho" that churns out high paying AdSense articles. Matt Mullenweg, the MoveableType founder, agreed to let Hot Nacho post its articles on the MoveableType website, thus taking advantage of that site's extremely high page ranking. Furthermore, Matt Mullenweg added invisible links to these articles.

When people found out about this, there were mixed feelings. MT is open source, so the question was whether or not it was morally right to make money this way. On the one hand, you're not exactly hurting the bloggers out there, but on the other, many of those MT blogs link to the homepage because they want to support MT and make it popular, but these same bloggers might not support the idea of "AdSense spamming".

There is no question as to whether this is legally right or wrong. Google doesn't allow AdSense spamming (and you have to click on "I agree" to sign up for AdSense), and since this news has gone out, Google has blacklisted the MT website, giving it a GoogleRank of zero.

Since then, Hot Nacho has released an explanation of what was going on. According to them, Hot Nacho is not specifically trying to "AdSense spam", but rather he was writing an experiment software to help bloggers find out what words are high-paying and which aren't. The details are a bit sketchy, probably because they don't want to give away all their trade secrets. At any rate, they claim that the point wasn't to AdSense spam (originally, the articles did not contain any AdSense ads at all, but were merely a bunch of articles on random topics), and admit that signing up to AdSense, and putting invisible links was probably a stupid move. The articles have been deleted off of the MoveableType server, and Google has restore MoveableType's GoogleRank score.