Splogging Turns To New Methods of Spam Tactics

The "State of the Splogosphere Part IV" gives us some hope that the continued problem of spam generation of blogs may be getting solved by the big blog search engines such as Google Blog Search and Technorati.  While it is far from complete, at the least, the engineers of these search tools are recognizing the issues and addressing them as best as they can (as echoed by Matt Cutts on Saturday).

Of course, that only means that the spammers use alternative methods to driving artificial links - comment spam has taken on a whole new meaning.  Even in our blog, which received little traffic, we end up filtering out comment spam on a regular basis.  I can't imagine authoring a blog with thousands of subscribers and manually filtering out the junk they receive.  What does this mean for the future of the social network?

My opinion is that social networks need to look at better filtering technology to get rid of the junk.  WordPress TOS clearly defines their intolerance to spam on their hosted servers and it can only be a matter of time before plugins are created to filter self-hosted blogs using the open source technology as well.  But the WordPress team eliminates blogs on their network that do not conform to guidelines as well - this is not just an empty statement.  The other blog software providers should be doing the same as well as the social network providers and "enablers" such as Technorati, Digg and YouTube.  If they do not, the greater danger is that they become useless or untrustworthy.  Think about how many web directories there are on the Internet that have so little value to the user.  The same may just as likely be said about Article Directories and Press Release syndication services. 

There is a reason that Google remains at the top of search technology today - because they care about the search results that they show and continue to find ways to update their algorithm to eliminate the misuse of web technology tactics designed to "game" their results.  But more importantly, perhaps they realized the fickleness of the web user, and the fact that by not doing this, the world of Internet technology easily allows their competitor to provide a better user experience and ultimately a better website.  The same needs to happen in the environment of the social network, and probably much sooner than later.