You knew it was coming and unfortunately now it seems like it’s here – spammers using both the comments and (as Teledyne points out, potentially far more damaging) trackback facilities to leave their messages and links to their sites.
I have a few reactions to this. Obviously I’m not happy about it. But I don’t think it’s going to bring down blogs (as it basically brought down Usenet, at least for me) as the spammers don’t have a way, as far as I can tell, to interfere with the main channel for communications in blogs – my choice of subscribing to your RSS feed and the content you choose to put in your RSS feed.
What I do think it will problematize, and this may not be a bad thing, is the use of comments and trackbacks to augment the ‘conversational’ aspect of blogs. It’s not that I don’t support this aspect of blogs – I absolutely do. But with the ‘comments’ feature at least, blogging broke from its own original model, the one in which one’s comments were made by posting (or re-posting as the case may be) to one’s own site and pointing to what one was commenting on. Before the ‘comments’ facility, a ‘conversational space’ in blogspace happened (and still can and does some time) through the nexus RSS feeds – if x number of folks all shared subscriptions to each other’s feeds, then you could get what looked like a conversation, albeit an oblique one, at times it not even being entirely clear you were being talked to or listened to. This is definitely not the most ‘efficient’ or ‘direct’ model of conversation ever invented, but against efficiency it had other advantages, one being the inability to hijack or pollute the ‘newsgroup’, as the ‘group’ in this case never existed in any one space, but only as a set of feeds, any of which could be excluded by any individual, thereby changing the set and the space.
Trackback is a bit more complicated – in theory it looked like it preserved the integrity of the blog model as one’s postings are made to one’s own site and all it’s doing is creating a linkage between the one being referred to and that posting (and there’s maybe the rub – maybe blogging means you don’t create anything on ‘my’ site). But Teledyne is absolutely right – the potential for automated misuse is far greater here. Again, it won’t necessarily effect my actual RSS feed content, and so I don’t think it will bring down for me what I think of as the blogs I read. But I can’t see what is preventing the automated harvesting and spamming of trackback addresses other than relative (compared to email) obscurity and success rates that are likely to be even lower than other nefarious spam methods.
Maybe we need to think of this as ‘Comment Spam’ instead of ‘Blog Spam’ – blog spam would be if Stephen Downes started posted Viagra messages, or Brian Lamb tried to sell me something to extend my … well you get the picture. But do you think I’d keep subscribing if that were the case? – SWL
– via [Channel ‘social_software’]