January 18, 2005

Call for a Web 2.0 Spam Squashing Summit

There'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 (or leave a comment, heh) and we'll get the mailing list and infrastructure set up. Kudos to all, let's keep this going.

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Posted by dsifry at January 18, 2005 11:23 PM | TrackBack | View blog reactions
Comments

Just posted about this on my site. If it's local, I might go :-)

Chris

Posted by: Chris DiBona at January 19, 2005 12:23 AM

Obviously we're with you on this one!

Posted by: sean bonner at January 19, 2005 9:34 AM

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!

Posted by: paul at January 19, 2005 11:04 AM

I'm probably interested. :)

Posted by: GoogleGuy at January 19, 2005 3:25 PM

Count me and/or Yahoo in.

Posted by: Jeremy Zawodny at January 20, 2005 5:12 PM

Sounds great, mabye Web 2.0 (the conference) can even play a role in some way!

Posted by: John Battelle at January 21, 2005 10:54 AM

I'd likely be interested in attending.

Posted by: Scot Hacker at January 21, 2005 11:07 AM

A few concepts related to the Summit: At the link below my name. Good luck to all!

David says, "giving users the tools they need to be empowered " -- Let people decide who can access their site feed. If certain people don't know about the location of content or feeds, they won't show up.

- Create your own invite list for your site feed.

Posted by: Mud's Tests at January 21, 2005 4:51 PM

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.

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