Call for a Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit
12There’s been a lot of activity around tagging links of late. Today, Google announced that they are supporting an industry-wide initiative to not count links that are tagged with the rel=”nofollow” attribute in their PageRank calculation. MSN, and Yahoo are aboard as well. Technorati is also supporting this effort, and those tagged links won’t contribute to a blog’s Technorati Authority, the total number of people linking to an blog. This is an important first step in removing the incentive for comment spammers from creating and propagating comment and trackback spam.
This is an open call to all of the folks in the weblog industry: Let’s have a Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit. Let’s continue to work together as an industry and as individual implementers, search engines, and toolmakers to work on squashing out comment, link, tag, photo, and other types of spam by giving users the tools they need to be empowered to squash the spammers dead.
Let’s do it soon. If you’re interested in participating, link/trackback to this post, tag your post with spamsummit (or leave a comment, heh) and we’ll get the mailing list and infrastructure set up. Kudos to all, let’s keep this going.
Tags: spamsummit
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Just posted about this on my site. If it’s local, I might go
Chris
prevent comment spam
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Tags has been live on Technorati for about a week now, and there has been much talk about the good parts and the bad parts of this new service. Talk for which I am very grateful. Like many, I too use Technorati to see what people are saying about our…
Obviously we’re with you on this one!
What we need to do is involve the best White Hat Hackers the world has ever known. Who knows maybe we can get sponsorship money from the FBI, they could benefit greatly from this exercise!
I’m probably interested.
Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit
Ever think that Google could take the lead in stopping comment spam by figuring out how to ignore links posted within blog comments? Since the purpose of comment spam is to create more links to sites and boost page ranking,…
Count me and/or Yahoo in.
Sounds great, mabye Web 2.0 (the conference) can even play a role in some way!
I’d likely be interested in attending.
The tools have been available to kill comment spam for a long time.
The trouble is simply some of the larger blog software development companies have failed to implement default anti-spam measures, such as jump scripted links, registration only comments, and disallowed HTML in comments.
Compare how many Blogger blogs vs MovableType blogs you’ve seen covered in spam, and ask yourself why one is mainly spam free, and the other is a main offender.
If you need a summit to answer that question, then there’s no hope for the internet at all.