Inductive Blacklisting?

It looks like someone is trying out some type of comment spam on AOL Journals.  Or was; it sounds like a straightforward Terms of Service violation and I'd expect it to get yanked quickly. 

Fortunately, Journals provides a way to both delete a comment and block the commenter's user id (screen name) from future comments to that Journal, which is handy in these situations.  But perhaps it doesn't go far enough.  Perhaps there should be an auto-blacklisting feature:  If enough different people comment-block a user id, perhaps it should be blocked from any further comments anywhere for a significant period of time.  It would at least slow down the spammers.

Comment spam and nofollow

AOL Journals hasn't been hit by comment spam yet as far as I know, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.  We're somewhat protected because we don't allow anonymous comments, but comment spammers can get around that once they put some effort into it.
So AOL Journals plans to support the initiative to make at least one form of comment spam ineffective -- the rel="nofollow" attribute.  The idea is that this would be honored by search engines such as Google, and would mean that these links wouldn't count towards increasing the page rank of the target.  So, this form of spam would be rendered useless immediately.  Of course, other forms would still persist, but I say it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness.   Or at least do both in parallel.

Virtuous cycle of creativity

The combination of blogs and aggregation is so powerful not just because these are complementary technologies in the obvious sense, but because they promote a 'virtuous cycle' that promotes the creationa and transformation of information.   Of course this cycle is nothing new -- it's been around since forever, through the media of books, libraries, universities, newspapers, et cetera -- but the blog/aggregation combination vastly speeds up the process and reduces the transaction cost to effectively nothing.  Which makes the Long Tail of the information economy accessible.

That's why the announcement of My MSN RSS aggregation with feed search is interesting; a My MSN aggregator, plus MSN Spaces means Microsoft can leverage both sides.  So they could make it very easy, for example, to subscribe to the RSS feeds for Spaces owned by people who comment on your blog.  Or do any number of other things which increase the value of being an MSN member.  And, obviously, these tools still interoperate with the rest of the blogosphere (note that Spaces has had RSS feeds since launch).

Spam spam spam spam...

Back in June, aparently, the FTC said that a do-not-email list (like the do-not-call list) would not work, and would generate more spam because spammers would use it as a source of new email addresses.  Though it's a bit late now, I have to wonder about the latter point.  Why not simply map each address into its MD5 checksum before storing it?

So foo@example.com would become "a0b6e8fd2367f5999b6b4e7e1ce9e2d2" which is useless for sending email.  However, spammers could use any of many available tools to check for "hits" on their email lists, so it's still perfectly usable for filtering out email addresses.  Of course it would also tell spammers that they have a 'real' email address on their list, but only if they already had it -- so I don't think that would be giving them much information at all.

I still think the list would be useless because spammers would simply ignore it.  But it wouldn't generate new spam, and it would drive up the cost of spamming by making the threat of legal action a bit more possible.

The Noosphere Just Got Closer

Of course it'll take several years, but Google's just announced project to digitize major university library collections means that the print-only "dark matter" of the noosphere is about to be mapped out and made available to anyone with an Internet connection.  Well, at least the parts that have passed into the public domain; the rest will be indexed.

I'm clearly a geek -- my toes are tingling.

The "5th Estate"

Interesting quote, from my point of view, in this article:

Jonathan Miller, Head of AOL in the US, testifies to the popularity of Citizen's Media. He says that 60 - 70 per cent of the time people spend on AOL is devoted to ‘audience generated content'.

(Though he's talking mostly about things like message boards and chat rooms, of course, rather than blogs.)

Welcome MSN Spaces!

A surprise to welcome me back from sabbatical: Microsoft released the beta of MSN Spaces (congratulations guys!).  I've been playing with it a bit over the past few days; there's some very cool stuff there, especially the integrations between Microsoft applications. 

(I've seen a few comments about the instability of the Spaces service; come on folks, it's a beta.  And they're turning around bug fixes in 48 hours while keeping up with what has got to be a ton of traffic.)