Slashdot Mirror
The Ham and Spam of Weblogs
An anonymous reader submits "Will the blogosphere become just as spammy as Usenet? There may be over 10M weblogs out there, most of them seem to be fake spam blogs created to manipulate the search engines. Scott Johnson, CTO at Feedster, complained that "at times we see upwards of 90% of the traffic from Blogspot being spam," and the problem is likely to only get worse. Can blog search engines like Technorati, Feedster, and PubSub filter the signal from the torrent of noise? Or will we have to seek new approaches such as the social filtering used by Del.icio.us or collaborative filtering used by Findory to separate the ham from the spam?"
I wish Google had an option to exclude blogs from my search. Considering many blogs use b2evolution, phpBB, or whatever, Google could easily determine what IS a blog and what IS NOT and filter it accordingly. Google IMHO would be a much better place if I could exlude blogs and those stupid parked domain search sites from my queries.
::242
I'm not trying to be flamebait; It would be a nice option though.
It was a bit unintuitive how you add sites to the filter list though -- just cut and paste "http://*.whatever.com/*" into your extensions list and any search results from whatever.com will then be greyed out.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
If you have a few minutes, click on the randomizer button at the top of the screen that reads "Next Blog" a couple of times. I'd be willing to say that at least 2 out of every 10 blogs is a spam farm.
It's just fucking sad.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Actually, Usenet is doing quite well. The spam battle has been won; there's very little spam in the technical groups. Serious workers in difficult fields are on there. Check out, say, "comp.games.development.programming.algorithms", where the people who write physics engines discuss how to do it. Or "comp.std.c++.moderated", where proposed changes to C++ are discussed. Usenet has far lower advertising content than the Web, where, today, "content" seems to be a little box in the middle of the page, surrounded by blinking ads.
If what you say above were true, I'd be careful where you point that mouth. The safety is off.
The Second Amendment is our right to guns, not our right to free speech. Free speech is in the First Amendment. So
And be very careful. All the First Amendment guarantees is " Congress shall make no law..." abridging freedom of speech.
If you want to go to a public park and preach religion or recite your political manifesto, the First Amendment guarantees your right to. But it's not absolute.
If you want to preach/recite on my front lawn, my property rights prevail and I can physically throw you off my property if you refuse to leave voluntarily. If you want to preach/recite at midnight and you're preaching/reciting too loud, city noise ordinances prevail, and the cops can arrest or ticket you if you refuse to quiet down or move along.
Slashdot is required to allow you a certain amount of leeway in exchange for safe harbor protections covering public forums, but that is a matter of them trying to avoid getting sued over any libelous/defamatory content in your posts, not any First Amendment guarantee they are obligated to provide you. And if you go beyond that leeway, they can ban you from posting and erase your posts.
So if you want to argue in favor of blog spam, find another argument. The First Amendment has nothing to do with whether Google and other blog services should voluntarily clean up their act and put roadblocks/barriers in place to stem the flow of blog spam.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
The slashdot programming team seems to have a policy of ignoring persistent problems for years.
However there are already some major sites with "sound" captchas for the blind -- craiigslist for example.
I mostly use my blog as a resource pool, pointing out sites I come across in my eclectic searches of the web, with a brief comment.
Thus, many of my blog entries take less than 10 minutes to write, and these are arguably *more* useful to my readers than the ones that take me more time to write.
Not that I mind captchas (as long as they're well implemented). Just pointing out that there is more than one way to use a blog.
-Eek
Like email spam, these sites will continue to exist so long as people click on the links, thus supporting the business model.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
If you want to preach/recite on my front lawn, my property rights prevail and I can physically throw you off my property if you refuse to leave voluntarily.
Only the police can use physical force to remove a trespasser, as any landlord knows. According to Wikipedia:
Trespassing is a good deal more complicated than someone simply refusing to leave your property. For instance, on rural lands in some jurisdictions, the property has to be enclosed and and posted with a No Trespassing sign before an intruder is guilty of criminal trespass. Or, a renter's right to be on the propery he rents supercedes the right of the owner.
In fact, if your property is a shopping mall, members of the public may have a right to be there for "non-commercial expressive activity." When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution protects free speech on public property but not private property, it also noted that individual state constitutions may protect freedom of speech on private mall property.
It appears that your property rights are, in fact, weakest when dealing with someone exercising free speech. There is an implicit recognition that in some situations, free speech is a more fundamental right than property rights.