Technorati Tag Spam & NoFollow Sucks

The following is a collection of random thoughts about NO FOLLOW and Technorati Tags.  I don't expect you to understand all of this post unless you have a little bit of an anarchist in you.

I don't like NoFollow. John Battelle says it best:

But what bothers me is that there may well be an ecology that evolves based on the link mojo in comments which we can't imagine but that would be important and wonderful and that will not develop if every comment has a tag telling search engines to ignore it. Like it or not search engines are now processors of our collective reality and fiddling with that requires some comtemplation.

I do like Technorati tags for the same reason that Liz Lawley is justifiably concerned about them: It gives us the control to do what we will.

I don't like it when people with power exert control over the rest of us.

The cream should rise to the top and the crap should sink to the bottom because of our collective voices. I  applaud technorati for enabling this. Yeah technorati :) I deride the search and blogging companies for limiting it. Boo Search Engines and Blog Tools :( 

There will always be people (spammers) using tools inappropriately for monetary gain. IMHO opinion there is a much bigger societal issue involved with these two new systems than eliminating spam which is mereley an annoyance.

The bigger issues is: Who makes the rules about what is important to read/index/value?

To celebrate the fact that there will always be this struggle (and that the struggle is a good thing) and that technorati tags is a step in the direction of freedom for the little guys I am demonstrating how easy it is to USE the hell out of technorati tags:

Random Technorati Tags (no point here):   tags folksonomy cars Jason Calacanis should get over Marqui viagra audi bmw go-go dancers valentines day flickr delicious whizspark upcoming.org evite cevent doodoo voodoo youdo that thing you do britney spears parishilton paris hilton video mercedes blue woman men kids aunt uncle weblogsinc corante gawker clayshirky lizlawley linksys router hp officejet garmin ipod nirvana  Actualités, Algemeen, All, Allgemein, Allgemeines, Announcements, Apple, Art, Articles, Blog, Blogging, Blogs, Business, Computer, Computers, Computers, and, Internet, Computing, Culture, Current, Affairs, Current, events, DVD, Daily, Life, Default, Design, Diary, Education, English, Entertainment, Entretenimento, Entretenimiento, FF11, Family, Film, Food, Food, and, Drink, Friends, Fun, Funny, Gadgets, Game, Games, Gaming, Geek, General, Geral, Hardware, Health, Health, and, wellness, History, Home, Humor, Humour, In, The, News, Internet, Iraq, Journal, LIFE, Links, Linux, Love, Mac, Macintosh, Main, Main, Page, Marketing, Media, Misc, MobLog, Mobile, Movie, Movies, Music, Musings, Musique, My, Life, Música, News, News, and, politics, Office, Buildings, Other, PC, Passatempos, People, Personal, Photography, Photos, Pictures, Poetry, Political, Politics, Programming, Quotes, Ramblings, Random, thoughts, Rant, Rants, Religion, Reviews, School, Science, Security, Site, news, Sports, TV, Tech, Television, Travel, Uncategorized, Viagens, Web, Web/Tech, Weblog, Weblogs, Work, Writing, berlin, book, books, d'amour, daily, days, etc, events, hobbies, iPod, memo, miscellaneous, others, photo, random, software, stuff, technology, thoughts, wordpress

Some of you might call this spam. I call it freedom. Also I am sure that I won't be the first one to do this. The same people leaving comment spam will soon learn how to automatically post to blogger with technorati tag-laden entries to viagra shilling sites. So technorati better figure out how to understand it. (I am sure they can come up with something better than a "rel=nofollow" tag). And then maybe google will buy them and implement a smart system for eliminating spam instead of a dumb one.

Thanks technorati for taking the journey with us.

There may be risks with new open systems like this as Liz Lawly points out eloquently and thoroughly but it is a fun experiment and worth the ride.

Oh. And why not just use a freaking CAPTCHA image to prevent comment spam?   

Comments

[c. s.]

Because CAPTCHA has accessibility problems for those who use assistive technologies (i.e. screen readers). Not only that, but CAPTCHA *has* been defeated incase you haven't been playing along with the rest of us.

[peter caputa]

good point about captcha. care to elaborate on the defeat of captcha?

[grant]

captcha defeated: http://sam.zoy.org/projects/pwntcha/

[peter]

what about challenge/response where email clicking on a link sent to an email account is required to confirm the address... like weblogsinc does.

I wonder how well that works or if that is defeatable, so easily?

[grant]

afaik: any time you expose the means by which a digital identity credential is created in an automated, programmatic process, it can be exploited programmatically.

you said you call this (tag bombing) "freedom". well okay. i agree. but freedom, you know, it is not free.

spam sent my wiki into ip-address access control lists last week. basically it is dead for the time being. not a solution.

so that's the price of this sort of freedom; the responsibility to figure out how to stop [x] from exploiting it without applying a solution that effectively strips us of it. either absolutely, or by degrees (e.g. repeated / redundant auth hassles).

SXIP is a step in the right direction but it just pushes the problem a little further down the "stack", if you will.

conversely, there's the notion that maybe -- just maybe -- world-readable permissions for self-published content, are, as a default, not the right way to go if you posit the existence of some form of trust network that extends out through social connections and let THAT determine who gets write access to your blog, your wiki, your whatever.... well, this gets into familiar territory i think, WRT foafnet etc.... and is straying way off topic.

btw, http://www.technorati.com/tags/CAPTCHA == nada. I suspect you crossed a signal/noise threshhold and triggered a constraint rule with the original post? You'd have to ask celik or kallen or someone else over there...

cheers.

[SEO]

yeah… !
wonder what happen if we all use nofollow on our websites? And how about DMOZ & Yahoo directory.

Have a good one.

[lon white]

how does your cock feel johnny?

[hhh]

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