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July 07, 2005

Spam or not? I think not.

My Web 2.0 is just over a week old now and, despite the limited number of beta testers we're working with, there's already 37,231 saved pages tagged with 14,098 tags! It�s really been a lot of fun to watch as interesting tags and pages pop up. Check out the tag this week in houseblogging--fascinating. Makes me wish I could afford a house out here in San Francisco sometime this decade.

With all the tagging going on, some folks are wondering about those classic issues of spam. Steve Rubel just posted about there being potential tag spam on My Web 2.0. I�m not so sure. It looks like one of our users is really just tagging stuff the way they want, enthusiastically I might add. I might not understand that tag (nor even like it), but if they find it useful I say go ahead and tag away.

Why can I say that? Well remember folks, My Web 2.0 is a social search engine where your community shares their insights with you. While the web can sometimes seem like the Wild Wild West, the trusted web is a place where you decide who you want to listen to. If I like the stuff that someone saves and the tags that they�re using, I�ll connect to them! If I don�t�well, you know.

Chung-Man Tam
My Web Product Manager

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Comments

The guy who did it says that he accidentally imported all of his bookmarks-- including a giant list of malicious websites-- into MyWeb. And, of course, there's no "mass delete" feature yet...

Posted by: - | July 7, 2005 10:19 PM

I have to agree that this isn't spamming.

Steve points to the Neighborhood W's contributions to the MY Web 2.0 page pool. Neighborhood W has put up over 1,400 pages into My Web 2.0 using 4 tags, "crapware", "nwh:bad", "dialers", and "nwh:dangerous". This volume places him/her at or near the top in ranking most popular tags which put him/her on Steve's radar. But the fact that these lead to nefarious sites doesn't mean they are spam. This could be Neighborhood W's collection of sites to test software against.

If these sites were tagged with "money maker" and "free stuff" it would be a different story.

If you see value in having these sites available to you, you might want to toss him/her an invite!

Posted by: Joe Beaulaurier | July 8, 2005 07:59 AM

MyWeb is all about "hanging out" in social network, sharing links and sites others consider valuable. While in traditional social networks people often went for the quantity rather than quality of friends, MyWeb is insistant that you should focus on quality. So if someone is spam-tagging in your network, just get rid of them, and spend the time searching for people who have similar interests and thus tag the stuff that's interesting for you.

Posted by: Alex | July 8, 2005 08:43 AM

Too funny. I've been using My Web to keep track of good houseblog posts I find during the week, then I write a summary each Friday called, yes, This Week in Houseblogging. Didn't consider until now that my tagging would get noticed in the public tag-cloud.

Posted by: Aaron | July 8, 2005 01:57 PM