Monday, May 30, 2005

Fighting tag spam with ... tags

The issue of tag spam has been making the rounds of the blogosphere recently. Just now I had an idea: why not fight tag spam with tags? If people spot tag spam, they could tag it with "report-spam" -- the more people apply this tag to an item, the more likely that the item is spam.

So if you are reading your del.icio.us/popular links and see something that looks like spam (an ad for low mortgage rates, say), you could tag it with "report-spam". If enough people tagged it with "report-spam", del.icio.us would filter it out.

Fight tag spam with tags.
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8 comments:

  1. Iain Lowe5/30/2005 7:09 a.m.

    Fighting fire with fire! I love it. It has a delicious (no pun intended) sort of poetic justice about it as well.

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  2. Anonymous5/30/2005 10:51 a.m.

    That's really a great idea. Personally though, I'd be more likely to completely ignore something that was spam than to click on the link and tag it. But if implemented, this would be very similar to Google's very complex algorithms weeding out spam web sites, only people would be doing it. Very smart. Keep the great ideas coming!

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  3. Anonymous5/30/2005 11:42 a.m.

    Wow Jonathan, you're really on an innovation roll this week. Or are you always thinking ahead this much?

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  4. Jonathan5/30/2005 12:15 p.m.

    Iain - Yes you did intend that pun. I know it. (And a good pun it was).

    Nuno - Yeah - I got the idea from Gmail, where people click the Report Spam button. The more people click Report Spam, the more likely that an email is spam.

    Jeff - Ha! Yeah, inspiration comes to me in bursts. Most days nothing comes to me, but some days I get a good idea.

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  5. Jonathan5/30/2005 12:19 p.m.

    Nuno - And del.icio.us needs to make it easier to tag things so we wouldn't be so reluctant to tag. Maybe using some of that shiny Ajax stuff.

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  6. Leon5/30/2005 4:01 p.m.

    It's a tricky issue. By spamming the spammers you draw attention to them. Ignoring them may make them spam more. At least the first option gives a little malicious satisfaction.

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  7. Claytonian5/31/2005 12:39 a.m.

    Good idea. Btw, visit my site!


    ...joke... don't hit me.

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  8. Jonathan5/31/2005 12:43 a.m.

    Hi Clayton. I was so not sure if your post was from a spambot (as it works as a generic comment). But now I realize that it is not! Close one!

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