Social software

Trying to keep up…

I’ll tell you something, either I’m getting old or podcasting (a concept so new that Google is still trying to correct me when I search for it) is going mainstream waaaaay too fast. Last week I spent a boozy evening (boozy enough to fall asleep on the train home again – Hello Harpenden!) in a smoke-filled room above one of those Soho clubs (no, not those Soho clubs) talking with a bunch of top media execs about, among other things, torrents, podcasting, Creative Commons and blogging – blimey. This is obviously going to be a really important area and I’m going to start meeting VCs who are ‘watching’ podcasting (just like they were ‘watching’ RSS last year and ‘watching’ blogging the year before that).

A flurry of links: iTunes Applescript guru Doug is now Podcasting (and why wouldn’t he?). Gigadial threatens to absorb the next six months of my life. At least I can pretend to be working while I’m listening (if you’re as old as me you’ll need this overview page). I think this clever thing allows you to publish torrents via your blog (and RSS, natch), which at least sounds useful. iPodder 1.1 is obviously worth a donation (I think I’ve finally found a reason to upgrade that Old Skool 5Gb iPod). I’ve just noticed that iPodder.org is run by Adam “Big Hair” Curry. Funny, cos Ivan was only asking about him the other day.

Meanwhile, Ben Hammersley, the man himself, a man for whom I’d like to buy a drink one of these days if he stood still for long enough – even if only to learn what it feels like to have an entry to yourself in Wikipedia – has come up with his own handy slug of server code which captures Real Streams, converts them to MP3s and then publishes them as an RSS feed (the rest is up to your local podcasting set-up). He also links to a tool for doing the local bit which sounds perfect – downloading now.

The only good idea in this entry is right down at the bottom

Today (Sunday) I’ve deleted about 130 spam comments from this weblog (with the aid of the redoubtable MT-Blacklist). Yesterday was about the same. Likewise Friday, Thursday and so on. I’m really fed up with it. In case you haven’t got up to speed on blogspam yet, the thing to remember is that the spammers aren’t interested in your opinion of their fascinating products or in your lovely readership or in a healthy debate… or anything really, apart from the boost to their Google pagerank that a link from your weblog might provide.

Blogspammers want to hijack the special treatment given to blogs by Google (and other search engines, these days). That’s why blogspam is indiscriminate about placement – nobody needs to read the comment so sticking it in a two year-old blog entry will do just fine. That’s also why you need to delete these bogus comments sharpish. In fact, the quicker you can delete your blogspam the better, since that will give Google fewer opportunities to index it. Sadly, although the blogspammers are clever enough to figure out which blogs to hit, they’re not clever enough to figure out which bloggers are motivated to delete spam comments quickly and thus provide no boost to pagerank.

And, of course, it would make no difference if they could figure this out because the barmy economics of spam means that not spamming produces no benefit at all to the spammer, since each additional spam has an incremental cost of effectively zero. We’re all wise enough these days to know that Google’s algorithm (the mythically cool and sophisticated Google algorithm) is tweaked and tuned continuously to exclude scumbags and miscreants so I wonder if the next logical step is for Google to exclude blog comments from the index all together (pretty easy, I guess, since comments are marked up in a fairly predictable way).

This would be a bad thing – destructive to the information value of the index – but obviously, at the same time, a good thing, since it would kill blogspam overnight and remove a significant pollutant from the information stream. Once blogspam stops producing a boost to pagerank, the economics goes into reverse and the spammers will stop and since genuine blog commenters don’t do it for the pagerank, there’ll be no reason for them to stop commenting and no damage to the vibrancy and usefulness of the blogosphere.

Hold on. Thinking about it, a subtler approach would be for Google to automatically delay indexing blog comments for, say, 24 hours. That would give bloggers a chance to delete blogspam before it could make an impact on pagerank while preserving the long-term value of comments for the index. That’s it. I think I’ve cracked it. Where do I collect my OBE?