November 2, 2006
The Internet, now with more noise
Last night at a Port 80 meeting in Perth, a few of us were discussing comment spam, and Nick Cowie made the suggestion I must be more popular than him with more spam comments on my blog.
As much as I would like to be popular, it’s not the attention I am really looking for. Since I installed Akismet around early May, I’ve received 28,586 comments which were spam on this blog. That, coupled with 7,622 spam emails to my main email address in the last week or so makes me start to wonder about the future of blog comments and email.
I agree with Adrian Lynch when he announces that email is dead. It’s been dying a slow death for a number of years now, and it’s not getting any better. Email clients and plug in filters keep improving, and the spammers keep improving their methods to get around it. Blog comment spam plug in developers are looking for further innovations, at the same time that spam software companies spend just as much on getting around them.
The internet was a hive of real activity many years ago, and now the dreaded spammers have just about killed it off. We’re deleting so much spam, and relying on so many filters, that we’re losing real emails in the process, and we’re just trashing any emails which don’t come from people we trust. I turned full moderation on my blog comments a month or so ago, and now when any real person comments, I must check it, approve it and then it gets published. A hassle for the commenter, and a hassle for me.
Newsgroups and many mailing lists have become so flooded, that no one bothers to even read them anymore, and even black hat SEO techniques with Search Engines means we’re spending more time trying to filter out the noise and find the real conversations.
Is there an end in sight? Who knows. Although one recent local court case put a smile on my face.
Image: Screen grabs of blog admin screen and Outlook.
November 2nd, 2006 at 1:18 pm
Miles your just too popular.. But what do we replace email, page searching or blog comments etc with.. whats the solution. Point to Point message / information certified validation?
November 2nd, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Miles - I’d really like to see some research in the area I briefly mentioned in my WD06 wrap-up post (http://www.purecaffeine.com/2006/09/web-directions-is-over) which hopefully I might expand on if I get time to look into the feasibility a bit more;
Basically the idea is that in Email 2.0 there won’t be such a thing as anonymous emails or email addresses using nicknames or whatever. In fact, there won’t be email addresses - you can send an email to a person or a legally registered entity such as a company - but not to an email address. There’ll be physical authentication protocols in place and the addressing will take place in the background.
So instead of writing to blahblah@blahblah.com, you will write to Miles Burke, with whatever extra bits are needed to narrow it down to the correct person. And that email will need to come from a person, ie Nathanael Boehm, not an email address.
If this were possible, then it would eliminate comment spam and email spam, except where you invite users to comment anonymously through a web form. Otherwise your comments and email will be tied directly to your identity.
November 3rd, 2006 at 3:55 pm
I was thinking about what Nathanael said, and it’s a great idea. Everyone is registered (just once) with a trusted ‘place where you register’… sounds great.
But who do you trust? (Maybe the government… but what about other governments?) Does it cost money to register. If it costs money can you convince everyone to do it. (And use the same protocol??).
Before I read Nathanael’s comments I was thinking of a trust network. I trust Miles, Miles trusts someone else etc. But that probably just too hard.
Sigh
November 5th, 2006 at 10:49 am
Well we already have the XFN thing happening; why can’t we just hook into that? And you can specify how far out you want relationships to be classified as “trusted” - so perhaps 4 levels: friends of friends of friends of friends of Miles can post or send emails. Once we get good XFN-like networks happening then these relationships will be exhaustively configured - so you can just say “Web developers” are “trusted” and that could include 2 million people; so you specify the branch you want to categorise and then everyone linked to that is included in that classification ??