upcoming: AIRWeb 2006
On August 10th, I’ll be on the panel about Blog Spam for AIRWeb 2006, which is part of SIGIR 2006 at the UW Campus in Seattle.
I think my perspective will be signifigantly different from the other panelists; Because Bloglines has a signifigant enough user base, we know what people actually read, and people generally don’t subscribe to Spam Feeds. The next question will be of course, how does Bloglines know if it is a real human subscribing to a feed….
Too bad the Mariners are away in Texas when I’ll be there.
July 23rd, 2006 at 7:16 pm
I’m confused.
and probably don’t know bloglines well enough.
but do you care if a bot subscribes itself to read spam feeds?
all that would happen is that bloglines would fill up it’s database with spam, but that wouldn’t matter to any of your readers as they wouldn’t read it.
or are you thinking of a mass of zombies subscribing and making their spam blogs ‘popular’ and appearing on that section of your page?
July 24th, 2006 at 12:13 am
In general yes, we don’t care about the Bloglines side of it — but the same Bloglines data that we use to display for feed reader users is used by the Ask/Bloglines Blog Search Engine — so if our backend is clogged with spam, our search engine could also be clogged with spam, in theory.