By: NuNet, Jan 12, 2011
Over the last week, in addition to my daily duty as administrator of www.whatsnewonthenet.com, I have been trying to read up on an issue dear to my heart - Online Spam.
On Tumblr itself, I have written on this subject before. Then, last
week, we published a news item on the setting up of a Spam Clock by
Search Engine Blekko. http://www.whatsnewonthenet.com/Internet-News.phphttp://www.spamclock.com
I was mortified to find that till today, i.e. Jan 12, 2011, 262,309,
972 pages of Spam had already been created from January 1. OMG! Interesting, I thought. When I clicked on
I read up on the blogpost by Blekko co-founder and CEO Rich Skrenta http://www.skrenta.com
on why the need for such a Spam Clock. (Actually, in my opinion, it
should be called as the Spam-Watch Clock.) Rich opens his post by
saying, “…..but it’s hard to remain optimistic about the future of the
World Wide Web. I think it’s fantastic that my kids have access in real
time to almost every piece of information and knowledge in the world.
But ever since we started working on Blekko, I’ve become exposed to the
dark side of the Internet.”
Point taken. Blekko & Rich may have fired a fresh salvo in the
war against Spam, I thought. So I decided to carry on with my own
research on Spam. I came across an incisive article on it by Paul
Kedrosky labelled, “Curation is the New Search is the New Curation”.
Here, Paul talks of how at the beginning (of the Internet) there was
Curation, which was then replaced with Search, read algorithmic.
Paul goes on to make a case for the return of Content Curation. He
says this: There are two things that can happen now. (Okay, three. We
could stop search, which won’t happen). We could get better algorithms,
which is happening to some degree, with search engines like Blekko and
others. Or, we could head back to curation, which is what I see
happening, and watch new algos emerge on top of that next-gen curation
again.
Paul and fellows of his ilk do agree that to curate 234-million Web
pages by hand would indeed be a difficult task. One option which he has
spelled out, which does have some kinda merit in it is “Crowd Curation”.
Instead of one Editor, many Editors doing the job of deciding the
legitimacy of a page or Content. Sounds like a workable idea.
Invariably, the articles that popped up on my research radar on Spam
(ironically, there were quite a few Spammy types too) referred to the
dominance of a single search engine Google, and the manner in which uses
alogrithms to spew its search results. Almost 90 per cent of Net users
resort to Google to find what they are searching for online. In the
bargain, they are riddled with Spam Content.
I would think one of the ways to go about tackling this online menace is to compartmentalise Spam. Yes, it is a way by which they (Spammers) steal traffic, yes, it is a way by which they defraud advertisers, yes, it is how they fool search engines.
Many online players have clearly understood and identified the
problem, which is a good thing. Let us now create momentum to tackle
Spam. The Spam-Watch Clock, may not have a complete scientific basis (as
said by Rich himself), but it does illustrate the problem. Before we
devise ways and means of tackling Spam, online majors need to understand
not only the depth of the problem but also its forms. Or else, I fear
that any attempt to bridle it would be too scattered to have an impact.
