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?"
With email spam filtering you have to consider each email separately. A blog has a persistent identity and reputation. In theory, this should make it easier to filter blog spam than email spam. On results of this type of filtering is that it will will penalize new blogs in search results, both spammy and real.
Blog comment spam will remain a problem, of course.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Slashdot is a blog, created in the context of a news site, which we all come to and bitch about things we want out of technology, think is/are cool, and/or hate and want everyone to know why.
That being said, Google (along with other large search engines) have already taken stances on blogging, and are actively pursuing their individual stances. For most, this is creating their own blog service, and doing some shifting in their code to make sure blogs don't come out on top. But this isn't an absolute truth.
If you want these things, and Google doesn't offer them, make your own search engine, and do it better. No, seriously, don't look at me like I'm crazy; there have been over a dozen "major" search engines created after Google, some are only in serious use by geeky populations (AlltheWeb, as far as I can tell, fits this), some by the trendy, some by the "I hate Google"ites, etc. etc. It's as simple as that.
One reason I think Google's strayed from taking such a hardline on blogs is simply out of ease of use. Google doesn't want to complicate life with a million more search options, especially ones you can deal with yourself by subtracting out the majorly offensive sites (-livejournal -blogger -blogspot, etc).
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush