31 August 2006 | Author: Mike Hanna
It came to light this week that research at the UCLA has came up with a powerful new way of counteracting Social Spam. By social spam, of course, we're talking about a variation on email spam. Email spam is a cross we all have to bear, but this new technology will use your social network of email contacts to help prevent email spam from hitting your inbox.
Naturally, the words "spam" and "social" put in the same sentence can strike fear into the heart of any ethical website optimiser. With social networks becoming increasingly popular on the internet it is a good assumption that unethical spammers have already more than thought about how they can use this developing platform to unethically affect search results.
Social networks such as del.icio.us and Digg.com are great places for the 21st century web user to share their favourite places to visit. Digg, for example, is a social news and search website and it works by users 'digging' news stories. Each registered user can only digg a story once, so theoretically each vote or 'digg' made for a news article is made by a unique user. The larger and, crucially, the more frequent, the number of 'diggs' an article gets the more prominently that article will feature on the Digg site. The problem, of course, is that spammers can register a large number of digg accounts and digg their own article a lot more than just once. This type of spamming can lead to the spammers' article being featured highly on the Digg site.
Del.icio.us is a similar network to Digg.com, but it uses its social network for bookmarking. The way social bookmarking works is similar to the social search functionality of Digg. With del.icio.us, each registered user can bookmark, or 'tag' a site that they like and enter the term that they would associate with that site. The site with the most tags for a certain term will turn up highest in the del.icio.us search function. The problem would come about if, as described earlier, an unethical spammer registered many del.icio.us accounts and tagged their site a lot of times to make that site appear higher in del.icio.us' search results. And with deli.cio.us being owned by Yahoo! it can be seen that the problem could be a real one to deal with in the future.
Bigmouthmedia's Internet Marketing strategy embraces social search in an ethical way, but the fear is that less ethical SEO practitioners may try to cash in on the social search vulnerability in the future.
At the moment Digg and deli.cio.us seem to be being used responsibly. They do have some spam detection incorporated in their site and with their quick growth it is sure that their spam protection will grow too, so our concerns over spam abuse may be put at ease. For now social search and bookmarking sites are relatively small in comparison to the likes of Google, but even Google is starting to get involved in the area of social search, with products such as Google Co-op and Google Notebook offering similar functionality. So, whether you're a user, developer or optimiser, social search is a technology to keep on top of now, and in the future.
Social networks - a potential for spam abuse?
As social networks become ever more prevalent online, will this give unethical spammers a license to spam? Perhaps even more importantly: is this the dawn of 'Social Spam'?It came to light this week that research at the UCLA has came up with a powerful new way of counteracting Social Spam. By social spam, of course, we're talking about a variation on email spam. Email spam is a cross we all have to bear, but this new technology will use your social network of email contacts to help prevent email spam from hitting your inbox.
Naturally, the words "spam" and "social" put in the same sentence can strike fear into the heart of any ethical website optimiser. With social networks becoming increasingly popular on the internet it is a good assumption that unethical spammers have already more than thought about how they can use this developing platform to unethically affect search results.
Social networks such as del.icio.us and Digg.com are great places for the 21st century web user to share their favourite places to visit. Digg, for example, is a social news and search website and it works by users 'digging' news stories. Each registered user can only digg a story once, so theoretically each vote or 'digg' made for a news article is made by a unique user. The larger and, crucially, the more frequent, the number of 'diggs' an article gets the more prominently that article will feature on the Digg site. The problem, of course, is that spammers can register a large number of digg accounts and digg their own article a lot more than just once. This type of spamming can lead to the spammers' article being featured highly on the Digg site.
Del.icio.us is a similar network to Digg.com, but it uses its social network for bookmarking. The way social bookmarking works is similar to the social search functionality of Digg. With del.icio.us, each registered user can bookmark, or 'tag' a site that they like and enter the term that they would associate with that site. The site with the most tags for a certain term will turn up highest in the del.icio.us search function. The problem would come about if, as described earlier, an unethical spammer registered many del.icio.us accounts and tagged their site a lot of times to make that site appear higher in del.icio.us' search results. And with deli.cio.us being owned by Yahoo! it can be seen that the problem could be a real one to deal with in the future.
Bigmouthmedia's Internet Marketing strategy embraces social search in an ethical way, but the fear is that less ethical SEO practitioners may try to cash in on the social search vulnerability in the future.
At the moment Digg and deli.cio.us seem to be being used responsibly. They do have some spam detection incorporated in their site and with their quick growth it is sure that their spam protection will grow too, so our concerns over spam abuse may be put at ease. For now social search and bookmarking sites are relatively small in comparison to the likes of Google, but even Google is starting to get involved in the area of social search, with products such as Google Co-op and Google Notebook offering similar functionality. So, whether you're a user, developer or optimiser, social search is a technology to keep on top of now, and in the future.
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