Replies tab

You’ll find all of the @replies to you at your replies tab when logged in. All of your replies, meaning: also from people you do not follow – they don’t even have to follow you. That’s different from the @replies in your twitterstream on the front page where you only see tweets (including @-replies) from people you follow¹.

Potentially, the @replies tab is a source for spam, but I haven’t seen any so far – and blocking the account solves the problem. Especially if you want to limit the number of people you follow, but still want to track replies from your followers, the replies tab is your friend.

But: there should be better ways than to check it regularly on the web, not?

Clients that integrate the @replies nicely

As Kris Hoet wrote:

• The client people use can tell you more about how much conversation people are willing to get into. [...]
• The client people use can tell you how fast (or not) people will see your replies, [...].

Like Kris, I really like Twhirl, because it integrates all of the @replies (and direct messages) in a nice and visually distinctive way in your timeline. Switch the display to the last 20 @replies just to check for those that may have dropped from your timeline already. (Next to that, Twhirl is a really modest client, fading in the background automatically and just popping up discretely for a few seconds in your peripheral vision when new tweets arrive.)

However: this will probably work if you’re behind your own computer regularly, not for people on the road or on computers they don’t control.

Authenticated @replies feed

For a more asynchronous way of tracking your @replies, there’s the corresponding feed at http://twitter.com/statuses/replies.rss. However: you’ll need a desktop feed reader, since not a single (as far as I know) web-based feed reader supports http-authentication (Update: Netvibes does – of course you need to trust them).

If you have your own web space, you could de-authenticate the feed with a php script I wrote and host that on a “secret” place². That is in fact how most services who publish personalised, private feeds, do it: they provide you with some “secret, non-guessable url”.

The risk then is that these feeds pop up in other people’s searches if you use them with a web-based feedreader, so the script features an access/privacy restriction. Introduced by Bloglines, it seems to be supported by other web-based feedreaders as well (on the feed-publishing side, only a few services include the element though!).

Still: not a solution for the non-technical and/or web-based user.

Using the Twitter “tracking” feature

Twitters tracking feature is a great way to get notifications when a word or phrase is mentioned, so you could as well use it to track “@your_username”. If you’re brand- or ego-aware than you will probably want to have a lot more words tracked, on top of the ego- and brandname-search feeds you already have running on Technorati and other blog search engines…

As an extra advantage, you also get the name-dropping tweets where “@your_username” is in the middle of the sentence – those are not captured by the @replies feed. Try “track twitter” to test the feature and experience the self-referential nature of the service :-). If you understand Dutch, check out the excellent screencast by Pierre Gorissen).

Two huge disadvantages:

• only works on Instant Messaging or on your phone (make sure notifications are ON), there’s no web-based way to use the tracking feature (you can have them archived in Google Talk/Gmail’s chat folder as a workaround)
• only works for public tweets. People who have their account protected aren’t tracked, not even when you follow them.

Twitter search services

When twitter doesn’t provide a feature, third parties jump in – both:

• Tweetscan: example (feed)
• TerraMinds: example (feed)

seem to provided excellent searches and searchfeeds. Tweetscan doesn’t distinguish between @username and username though, Terraminds does and has a longer history.

But again: only for public tweets!

Sidenote on silos…

If you have a closer look at the above list, there’s a multitude of ways (3d party services) to scan public Tweets for replies, or phrases and keywords in general. It’s a lot harder have that done for private accounts you follow – and you need username and password for it³ – something you shouldn’t trust a 3d party with. In fact, when it comes to non-public information, all content platforms and social networks still are closed silos.

But there’s change in the air: Twitter is one of the services pioneering with OAuth, a generic open specification on how to give access to your private stuff to 3d parties without giving username and password (you give them a unique “access token” you can revoke at any moment).

OAuth doesn’t solve “that other problem” Twitter has though: the constant polling for new updates (via the API and via feeds: 20 times more than “normal” web usage!) tears the service down regularly.

An exciting effort that is going on right now is: moving from polling (or pull) to secure and authenticated push between services, with Jabber, OpenID and Oauth as building blocks. On this side of the Atlantic, it’s Mediamatic in Amsterdam that is bringing people together: check out the project blog on Federating Social Networks – a meeting is planned this very weekend.

More Twitter musings

1. You could ask yourself: why do people use Twitter, that’s supposed to be all about non-critical information, for direct remarks or questions? Isn’t email or private instant messaging more reliable? I tend to think⁴ we use it as a form of social blackmail. By taking your followers as witness, you kind of force the addressee to reply because – “hey, people might think I don’t know the answer or can’t come up with a witty riposte“.

2. In a previous post on Twitter usage, I kind of speculated that after the quick uptake by “IM-Bobs” (the heavy digerati, users that are behind their computer most of the time) a broader, slower uptake would follow by “Sms-Alices” who use it for what Twitter was probably meant for: keeping friends and close relatives up to date on your whereabouts with text messages. This funny New-York Times column seems to contradict that:

“The people who I see using it are [...] people in marketing or P.R. or advertising, who use it for work, to present themselves as particular types of people. They’ll twitter, ‘I’m traveling,’ or ‘I’m going to interesting restaurants.’ They’re using it to do identity work.”

So it’s all marketeers and egomaniacs after all :-) … Whether you feel you fit in either category (or both of them) or not, you nog longer haven an excuse for missing your @replies!

1. you can still fine-tune: either following no conversations at all, or just between them and people you follow as well (the default), or listen to their conversations with “strangers” – the latter is a good way to get to know new people
2. since you do not want to expose tweets from people who keep their tweets protected, right?
3. Update: Twittermail provides this service
4. in fact it was Ine who pointed it out to me :-)

Since you give up privacy to people with whom you share the same physical space in real life anyway, the default option of having your profile visible to members of the same network seems logical. This however goes awfully wrong with regional networks – maybe even more so with the non-US regional networks where they lumped together entire countries or parts of the world where Facebook membership is still scarce.

Regional networks and privacy settings

Joining your regional network is the default step after filling out your location:

Joining a regional network is also a natural thing to do: as soon as people join a global community, the first thing they long for is affirming their local identity. So joining a regional network is for most people just a statement about themselves, just like joining one or more of the gazillion groups on Facebook, whose purpose is nothing but expressing an opinion or idea in the group title.

Facebook however takes its mission of “modeling the social graph” seriously, and joining a network isn’t just a light-hearted expression of a passing emotion: not only is it made hard to switch regional networks…

… joining a network has drastic consequences: it makes your profile, and the applications your install, by default viewable to all of your networks, including your regional network:

In countries like Sweden and Norway (resp. 1 in 9 and 1 in 5 on Facebook!) where the entire 15-35 demographic is on Facebook, joining the “regional network” amounts to making your profile public… Two weeks ago, I spent some time browsing through profiles of members of the network “Belgium” (127.000 members back then, 148.000 at the time of writing) and I am pretty sure a lot of the profile information was definitely not meant for total strangers to see.

What to do?

If you take Facebook seriously (i.e. really consider it a safe environment to communicate and connect with people you care about), you might do the following:

• set profile and (most of your) applications‘ visibility to “friends only” or just allow networks you really have an idea who the members are
• be extra thoughtful with applications where you interact with other people: do you think they want their comments, postings, preferences to be visible via your profile/newsfeed?
• determine for yourself what your “boundary of trust” will be and refuse friend requests from people who don’t fall within these lines
• ask yourself whether you want to be found on Facebook by people searching your name (because you might lack the courage to refuse them)
• weed out decaying relationships systematically

Don’t think you have the guts and/or discipline to stick to those rules? Don’t worry, most people haven’t (if any). Which is the reason why quite a few smart people think Facebook, like its predecessors, is doomed to fail its grand ambition.

So here’s another approach:

• determine for yourself what your “public membrane” is – you should feel comfortable with all information outside the membrane potentially being known to everyone (including parents, colleagues and neighbours) – it doesn’t mean you want them to know, it means you accept the risk of them getting to know
• if you have a weblog, you already have defined that membrane for yourself…
• as long as you play outside the membrane, go and lead a carelessly info-promiscuous Facebook (and other social network) life

(Inspired by a conversation with Clo, and this one with Peter Vandenabeele. You might want to post this to Facebook?)

How IMBob and SmsAlice got connected via Twitter

On the left you see IMBob. IMBob likes to be online all day. SmsAlice, on the right, is an outdoors girl: she’s always on the road.

Now IMBob would like to text-message SmsAlice. But he doesn’t like those tiny little phone buttons. So he fires up Google Talk(*) and adds twitter@twitter.com to his buddy list.

See how the conversation goes on the screenshot:

And here’s what Alice gets on her phone:

IMBob invited you to Twitter.com! Reply with your name, so we can get you set up! Standard text rates apply!

Her answer(***): “Sms Alice”

Awesome! Please reply with your preferred username!

Her anwser: “SmsAlice”

Welcome SmsAlice! Have your friends send “Follow SmsAlice” to 40404(****) to get your updates. Send Help to learn more.

Alice happens to know already about Twitter, so she sends the only thing necessary to actually get the messages: “ON”.

Notifications are on. Turn them off by sending OFF.

Now every time Bob IMs to twitter@twitter.com, Alice gets his message on her phone. And everytime she texts an answer, Bob gets to read it in his IM window.

All that without doing anything else then sending IM and text messages: no signup, nothing!

How IMBob and SmsAlice grew apart

Now Bob starts surfing around on Twitter.com and gets himself a lot of friends (yes, Yet Another Social Network for Bob!). Because he is on his laptop, reading and posting Tweets (that’s what these micro-postings are called) is really easy and quick. So he often replies on Tweets (fortunately he soon discovered how to use the “@” properly!). Bob likes to see his friends’ stream of consciousness pass by when he’s on the laptop. Sometimes he just thinks out loud himself on Twitter…

For Alice though, things are different. It’s not that she doesn’t like Twitter. In fact, she likes the fact she can subscribe to (and unsubscribe from!) all kinds of news updates and alerts without giving away her phone number to yet another company. Her phone and her phone number are something intimate to her, you know.

And yes, she wants to be updated on the whereabouts of some close friends and relatives. But getting the stream of links and ideas IMBob posts for his online Twitter friends doesn’t make sense via SMS… Even when receiving text messages is free (like with her and almost all mobile operators in Europe), it’s just too much time and hassle cleaning out her inbox on the phone. She’d rather limit herself to other people using text messages and doing that as sparingly as she herself does. So she sees no other option than unsubscribing (leaving!) IMBob on Twitter…

How IMBob and SmsAlice found a compromise

But hey, Twitter has direct messages! So even when she “leaves” IMBob, they still are friends, and Bob can send an occasional direct message to her.

At least that is: in theory. If you send a direct message to someone who only uses Twitter via IM or the phone, you get the Abominable Twitter Kitten (and it has been like that for more than a month or so, I wonder whether the Twitter people really want to repair it):

So if IMBob wants to gets past the Abominable Twitter Kitten, Alice first needs to go to the web to complete her registration and get a web account as well. That’s all there is to! Now she gets Bob’s direct messages as she’s supposed to!

Oh and BTW, Twitter has these Phone & IM Settings where you can limit your notifications to “Direct Messages”:

That’s not what SmsAlice wants (because she wouldn’t be able to get the BBC Breaking News, remember) – but it could be a good idea for Bob if ever he was to leave his laptop behind for a while (if ever!).

How SmsAlice and IMBob happily Twittered along

So that’s how it went… IMBob kept sharing his thoughts behind the laptop and SmsAlice kept limiting her thumbs and attention to urgent and intimate tweets… and to a totally differenty circle of contacts than she would have had online. With the exception of IMBob’s occasional free computer-to sms direct messages, like we all used to do at the end of the nineties :-) *****.

Moral of the story

Although the Twitter idea is to blend phone and online, that is probably not true for most of us. We do have different contacts online and on the phone, different friends, different kinds of interaction, different social network.

Most of the Twitterers are IMBobs. Not because most people are more likely to be an IMBob than an SmsAlice (I’m pretty sure it’s the other way around) but because trends spread faster over the web – so the number of IMBobs grows faster. (And SmsAlices are less visible because they would probably want to hide their tweets from search engines!) .

But there probably is an IMBob and SmsAlice in each of us. So if you feel frustrated with your Twitter phone/IM dichotomy, just get a second account. After all you are a different person on the phone and online.

* Pictures from fictitious Bob and Alice: Striatic and Moriza via Creative-Commons searchengine Flickr-Storm.
** Could be any Jabber client. Or use TwitterIm when you’re on AIM
*** that would be 40404 in the US or +44 7781 488126 in Europe or most of the rest of the world
**** Yep, they forgot to internationalise that message :-)
***** There are still free web-to-sms services nowadays. Haven’t used them, do not know how they treat phone numbers…

• Complete Digg Tools Collection
• Digg Tools by Weston Campbell
• Digg Blog

Digg searches are analogous to the above-mentioned blog searches:

• full text search for keywords in story titles and descriptions
• a link search to list the stories digged with (and within!) that url, or…
• stories pointing to a specific url

Which is why I adopted my Google Blog search bookmarklet to a Digg version:

Digg Search Bookmarklet installation

Firefox

• Right-click this link: Search Digg and choose “Bookmark This Link”
• Click the “Create in” dropdown and choose “Bookmarks Toolbar Folder”
• (quick alternative: drag Search Digg to your links toolbar…)

Internet Explorer

• Right-click this link: Search Digg and choose “Add to Favorites”
• Click “Yes” if there is a “May not be safe” popup
• Choose “Links” in the “Create in” pane and click “OK”

Using the bookmarklet

• Select a keyword or a phrase in your browser and click the bookmarklet, and you’ll get a list of “hot stories” on that subject.
• With nothing selected, get the digged stories who have a url containing your current location (you probably will want to start from a homepage, e.g. to see the “Digg popularity of a certain blog, unless you search for stories pointing to a specific frequently discussed URL like www.google.com/calendar ).
• Firefox users: open a new tab with CTRL+T, click the bookmarklet, and you’ll be prompted for a seach query

The bookmarklet yields searches ordered by number of Diggs, but you can easily modify the “http://digg.com/search?xxx=” phrase in the javascript to any of the advanced options by test-and-replace. Digg will probably not be your most often used search engine, but it definitely has its place next to general search (probably Google), mainstream news (Google News), resources (del.icio.us!) and blog search (I use both Technorati and Google Blog search)…

Inspired by “Digg for Power users“, via Steve Rubel.

• you left a comment on a blog posting, hoping to get feedback from the author or other users on your question or remark
• revisited the page after a while to check for follow-up comments
• … revisited … revisited… revisited… finally gave up on it or forgot
• discovered a few months later that an interesting follow-up had been posted afterwards, with exactly the tip or info you needed badly back then

Blog commenting as a collaboration tool is frustratingly flawed, and here are some suggestions what you can do about it as a commenter, blog owner or external service…

As a commenter

Tips to follow up on your external comments:

• Look for a comments feed and put it in your reader to track further reactions. I have a separate folder “conversations” where I keep these feeds (at least for a while)
• • WordPress provides a comment feed per posting by default (so it’s normally there, often without publishers knowing about it): simply append “/feed” after the url if it has a “nice” url like “/date/subject/”, or “&feed=rss” if the url is like “p=xxx”.
  • As far as I know, most other blogging tools don’t have it by default, but some publishers have a comment feed for the entire blog, (typically something like /comments.rdf at Typepad) which might be an alternative, if comments are scarce. (BTW for WordPress, the entire feed is at <blogurl>/comments/feed/ or <blogurl>/?feed=comments-rss2)
• You should at least give the author the chance to contact you. If you hesitate to give your e-mail address (spam or privacy concerns), then:
• • take a free junk mail address (Gmail.com probably is the most spam-resistent and the most “open” solution: you can use your pop-mail client, forwarding, etc…)
  • if you own a domain: configure a catch-all mailbox and then you can make up your mail addresses freely (I do it in such a way I can tell the origin if I get spammed afterwards, such as comment.yourdomain@mydomain)
  • take temporary mail addresses: Mailexpire.com, choose whether you want it to expire after 12 hours to 3 months
• If none of the above works: use one of the “web page change tracking services” like WatchThatPage.com. More of them are discussed in this overview.
• Decent blogging software provides permalinks for every individual comment (mostly the link behind the timestamp). So in case you really want to manually track your own external comments: bookmark the comment permalinks in del.icio.us or another bookmarking service. Use a separate tag and you might even republish your external comment feed (del.icio.us/rss/<accountname>/<tagname>) to your own blog.
• or use one of the discussed services

Commenting etiquette:

• Be nice and polite:-)
• Trackbacking is different from commenting.
• • You might want to document an interesting posting for yourself by linking to it on your own blog, elaborate the idea further, recombine it with other insights, whatever. But trackbacking is nothing but a notification that you have referred to the original blog posting, is not a part of the discussion, is not a request for feedback.
  • So do not simply trackback and expect the discussion to continue at your own blog, that would be like stealing the thread.
  • (You might do both however, ask a question in a comment, and notify the poster with a trackback you elaborated the idea further at your own ground.)

As a blogger

Make life a bit easier for commenters:

• Provide a comment feed per posting or use a blogging tool that does it by default :-) (and if so, do not strip away the links to the feeds that are in the template)
• Even if you do have a comments feed, e-mail notification on subsequent comment postings is a good idea (especially if you have a non-geek audience unaware of rss )
• • for WordPress, there’s the great “Subscribe to Comments 2.0 ”: it adds a checkbox to the comment post form so the commenter can subscribe for notifications of new postings (an unsubscribe-link is sent in every notification mail, together even with a personalised link to an interface where the subscriber can then manage the rest of his or her own subscriptions).
  • Other examples: Serendipity has it built-in, Typepad has a plugin– there probably are analogous plugins for most open source blogging engines
• At least provide the possibility to leave an e-mail address, but hide or obfuscate it for spambots.
• In case none of the above exists: some suggestions for a comment answering etiquette:
• • you are not obliged in any way to answer to comments. No one can claim you to do so, no one can even claim the right to have his or her comment published on your blog (or even claim you have to have comments at all)…
  • … but please, if you do answer to a comment, do not assume your blog is the center of the world and the commenter will get back to it every day, so do send at least a notification mail with the permalink of your response (which makes it clear you want the conversation to continue on the blog, not per e-mail).

Some issues for a heavily commented blog:

• threaded comments might make it easier to follow the conversation (WordPress: use this plugin). Some other suggestions for the readability of comments on this great blogging design blog.
• You might want to refer to an accompanying forum for discussion. After all, that’s what forums are just better at… If a lively discussion ensues, provide a link afterwards to this topic, or if you’re a developer, there are even more creative solutions*
• As as sidenote: comment spam is a technical issue, it should not be an argument in whether or not have comments on your blog anymore. Spam captcha’s or a centralised authentication system (like Blogger’s or Typepad’s) are effective but annoying – a really great solution is Akismet.

As a service

The flaws of blog commenting have inspired some people to build services to cope with it, here two of them:

• Commenter-driven: Cocomment
• • launched this weekend
  • provides
  • • a bookmarklet to capture the comments you want to follow (there’s already a Greasemonky userscript as well, see this review at Techcrunch)
    • an rss feed …
    • … and a javascript widget to republish them
  • which is more or less the same functionality as bookmarking your comments in del.icio.us as described above, with the difference that Cocomment does store the comment text, but instead of the permalink to the comment., it stores the posting’s permalink
  • more promising however are visualisations like this one, that give a nice overview of where in a thread this user intervened. However, if you compare the Cocomment version of the thread with the original one, you’ll see that only registered users are included in the thread, so the usefullness will be limited to blogs frequented by lots of Cocomment users…
• Blogger-driven: MyComments
• • Argentinian service, not yet launched in English [Update: there is an English version meanwhile]
  • here the blogger has to install a plugin – and the service collects all comments on the participating blogs
  • any user/commenter can get a feed of his comments by simply submitting their e-mail address, no other action is required (I assume the matching is done on a hash of the mail address, I should look in the code of the plugin)
  • the requirement of the plugin installation will make it hard to make this solution popular I’m afraid… It can work for smaller communities of heavily interacting blogs.
  • [Update] I had a look at the code meanwhile, and the plugin simply pings the Mycomments server with all the data of the comment (blog name, comment text, posting permalink…)… including the unhashed e-mail address of the commenter! There’s no way MyComments will ever get a user base this way, even if it might be set up in good faith – who’s ever going to entrust the mail addresses of all of your commenters to a third-party database??

Without doubt, this will probably just be the start of a whole range of similar services. [Update: (Drupal developer) Boris Mann mentions SXORE, soon to be launched, as a "cross-blog identity provider.] Cocomment and MyComments rely on the active participation and consent of either the commenter or the blogger, but probably we’ll see more screen scraping services in the future. Several services will try to connect up all the comments we made all over the blogosphere in a C(omment)log. The Gravatar service seems have the a head start here, since they can find all gravatar-enabled discussion threads in their referer log!

* This is an example I implemented myself: a dynamic javascript (the javascript produced by php) as an addition to a newsfeed that checked whether there was a topic in a phpBB forum with the same title as the newsarticle. If not, it wrote a link to a new posting that prefilled the form fields with title and backlink to the articile. If on the other hand there were already postings, it linked to the discussion with the number of reactions included.

Seedwiki:

• like all other services, free version has contextual ads running
• paid versions have password protection, user management
• the free version does not have its own subdomain like many other services offer
• has a WYSIWYG editor – no has several WYSIWYG editors at the same time, which makes it kind of confusing!

Conclusion: has some nice features, but for my purposes, this was far too complex and not (end)user friendly enough.

PBWiki:

• Spartan interface
• the ads or support links are a bit in-your-face
• no possibility to edit without registration – you need “the” wiki password (that only the issuer can change)
• no help on wiki syntax found (you can have at the wiki source of example pages, and it follows the usual Wiki Markup)
• no possibility to delete your wiki

Not satisfying at all, unless for a closed group of geek-minded users

WikiCities:

• based on MediaWiki (the software Wikipedia is running)
• so no WYSIWYG, and Mediawiki was probably too feature-rich and too complex

Conclusion: probably a good solution for people already into wiki’s, not for my purpose

Schtuff:

• document-centered, not page-centered
• homepage shows last documents instead of being editable
• “creating a document” requires a pop-up window?!
• not WYSIWYG
• registration is required to edit
• the only service I saw with the possibility to delete (your own) spaces (which is a plus)

Far too complex and far from user-friendly, I can’t see why it got such good reviews.

Wikispaces :

• no possibility to delete or to rename self-created wikis (*)
• I found the pop-up to create links a bit confusing
• sober, but effective WYSIWYG, multilevel bullet lists being the only feature I really missed
• Feeds: global feed for page changes, comments feeds, per-page feed
• really big plus: editable left menu, so end users can navigate through the wiki easily without getting lost in the wiki functionality!
• there’s a comments feature, but it’s not really well integrated into the wiki pages, and it’s impossible to delete comments

Conclusion: the people behind Wikispaces have really thought about how create a finished wiki product out of the myriads of existing wiki practices: simple, nice interface, but still feature-rich enough if you dig deeper.

Xwiki.com

• has more portal features than being a pure wiki
• too complex, so I gave up on registration

Riters.com

• hosts MoinMoin wiki’s
• so again too geeky for my audience

Overall conclusion:

Wikispaces definitely has some drawbacks, but for my purpose at this time there was no competition. (Going through my list again, I noticed I mainly wrote down negative points, but I can imagine each one of these services can be a satisfactory solution for a particular purpose or a particular type of users!)
I did not consider paid solutions like Jotspot, Confluence or Socialtext, but they really might be worth the money (as well as the paid upgrades of the free hosts I described) if you’re searching for a more complex solution or one that has to be more lasting than the throw-away wiki I needed for this one event.

More resources:

• Wiki Farms: Chaotic, but up to date and helpful listing of wikifarms (at Ward Cunningham’s Mother of All Wikis)
• List of wiki farms: from Wikipedia
• Wiki based websites: at a wiki on wikis by Wouter Van daele, who’s also a speaker on the topic of wiki’s
• (added Oct 31) Peter Forret’s June 2005 wiki farm evaluation: I had totally forgotten about this posting, although I commented on it… Memebot, which is in his list, doesn’t accept any new signups anymore

* Update January 9, 2006

Also note that it wasn’t possible to delete or rename individual pages.  (You could delete a page by simply emptying the content, and “rename” it by moving the content to a newly created one as a workaround).  Wikispaces has added this feature now, but still internal references to pages aren’t updated automatically.  I know cool URL’s don’t change, so one should not encourage renaming pages, but still it feels strange that there is a feature called “renaming” without at least the option to have all references updated automatically (like the open source wiki TikiWiki does, for example).  I assume it’s only a matter of time before it’ll be added to the impressive list of other improvements…

• pure html + javascript (that I like best)
• clickable map (collapsed state in this case, the whole map was too big)
• browsable java applet (gives an idea of the Freemind interface itself – heavy 300 kb applet though!)

I added more text and links since Friday and created a Wikipedia article stub on linklogs.  Let’s see whether the rest of the world thinks Linklogs are a subject worth as decent an entry as Blogging…

About the presentation itself:

Evaluation was mixed: a bare-bones outline (this is the original mind map) and a bunch of open tabbed Firefox windows is a bit risky as preparation.  When I lost track of the order at some moment, it became euhm… a bit chaotic I’m afraid (my apologies if you had to sit it through!). Still I’m happy at least some people got some inspiration from it.  Lesson learned: determine scope beforehand and don’t try to focus on more than 1 or 2 points in a “short” presentation (thank you Cindy).

(BTW: I must have been really hyper since I spent more than half an hour searching for my keys on leaving for Brussels  – I thought I had accidentally dropped them.  I went twice through my car and my weekend holiday luggage  on a dark parking lot…  In the end, they were still in a door lock!)

• measures by weblog providers, such as Blogger (“Incorporated Subversion”)
• cyber vigilantism (“Simple Thoughts”)
• reputation-based filtering (Ross Mayfield, he links to an interview with a spammer btw!)
• search engine countermeasures (“Micro Persuasion”)

It’s probably search engines that hold the key here. Spamblogs are annoying, not because of their mere existence, but because you notice them: they show up in search results. Technorati is very much aware of it and tries to do its best (David Sifry’s March report):

“Part of the growth of new weblogs (30,000 – 40,000 each day) created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs – fake blogs that are…”

“…we feel that we’ve been able to capture and identify most of the spam out there, but one should note that there is definitely blog spam that we don’t catch…”

Why not lend Technorati (et al) a hand…

… and tag the spamblogs that slipped through the net. If you get annoyed by a Spamblog showing up in your Technorati Watchlist (or Google Alert, or any other search feed), report it, tag it: “spamblog” * ! You could use del.icio.us or furl, the services that are being aggregated by Technorati.

Yes, I know, there are obvious objections. If your furl/del.icio.us rss feeds are being republished, you increase the Spamblog’s exposure, and without rel=’nofollow’, even its pagerank, exactly what the spammer is aiming for. You might keep the “bad” links in another account, or another bookmarking service than you normal link collection.

Still, hunting spamblogs by tagging them as spam is a tool users have available at this very moment. And it is simple and easy to use**. For the spambusters, using the spamblog tag rss feeds in (semi) automatic blacklisting is piece of cake. And yes again, there’s the danger of having controversial, opinionated blogs ostracised by adversaries – but Technorati et al can easily outweigh spamtags against “affirmative” tags and incoming links. So let’s start!

* as suggested in my introductory post, I would limit the tag “spamblog” to machine-generated blogs – and distinguish them from “fake” or “character” blogs…
** unlike e.g. the Votelinks concept, that hasn’t taken off so far

Update 20.00h, June 1

Continuing on “outweighing spamtags against ‘affirmative’ tags and incoming links”: Pubsub, a service similar to Technorati already has a system called “Linkranks” they use to filter search feeds: see the discussion at: hyku.com. Technorati probably has something similar.
Without any doubt, blog search services like Pubsub and Technorati definitely should include in their own interfaces as well an easy way for their users to report spamblogs (like you can report spam in Yahoo of Gmail), but centralised, independent “blogspam reservoirs” such as http://del.icio.us/tag/spamblog or http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=spamblog could help all of them and would definitely be a step forward from sending an email to feedback@, which is the procedure now.

Update June 25

Adsense has an easyway now to report spamblogs that are running Adsense Ads. From Jensense:

“If you see a site violating the AdSense terms, you can now file an anonymous spam report that will get to the quality team for checking. To file a report, you simply go to the page that is showing AdSense ads and click on the “Ads by Google” (or “Ads by Goooooogle”) link. In the form on the next page, include the term “spamreport” and put in a short reason about why you feel the site is violating the AdSense terms or policies. You can also enter your own email address, if you wish, then click submit.”

Update July 13

Apparently, the idea of building a public blacklist of spamblogs on del.icio.us or other bookmarking services hasn’t taken off.
If I had given it more thought then, I should have seen why: there is no incentive for denouncing a blog as spamblog as long as blog search engines don’t use it (a chicken and egg problem: they won’t do this before some substantial amount of data has been collected ).
And even then, there’s no immediate reward for doing so. What the user wants (as I suggested at other complaints on spam blogs and technorati spam), is a simple simple “report as spam” button or link in the (web/email/rss) interface itself (comparable with the email spam buttons in Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail etc…) so that annoying blogs or feeds are filtered from the resultset immediately. Definitely something to look forward in a next Technorati release, see the David Sifry’s comments on this blog search wish list.
So far for the idea of having a public blacklist, because I’m afraid none of the services (Technorati, Feedster, Pubsub, Yahoo Myweb2.0,…) will be motivated to share its results though (the ability to effectively filter out spam being a major competitive advantage!)…

Blogs are no exception. Comment spam, is one of the results of the automated scripts spammers use to target standardized blog software. Entire machine-generated blogs, “Spamblogs” are another.

Why would anyone set up a blog that’s being written by automated scripts?

• scraping contextual advertising money, examples: Cheap Car Auctions 4U and Cost Per Click Advertising (and yes, I did use the rel = ‘nofollow’ attribute :-) )
• boosting the pagerank of another (e-commerce) site: a special case of Link Farming, a form of search engine spam*
• doing both, such as this gift basket blog, both promoting a Get Rich Quick scheme and another AdSense Honeypot on online gifts

How does it work?

You start with some keyword sets and variations referring to expensive merchandise: cars, insurances, jewelry… Then you use some search engine APIs** to fetch content being written on this subject, and pump fresh results into the fake blog with regular intervals, using the Blogger API**… and voilà!

By the way, I would suggest to reserve the word “spamblogs” for machine-generated blogs in the strict sense, and indicate fictitious blogs set up by marketeers, as “Character Blogs“, or, when they’re really bad taste *** “Fake Blogs” :-).

Some more on Spamblogs in Action and Hunting Spamblogs now.

* one could argue a search engine like Google is social software too, since its main algorithm tries to produce relevant results for your search term by weighing the votes (hyperlinks) of all participants on the web (webmasters, bloggers…).
** an API is a way to programmatically do things: search engine APIs let you fetch and process search results using your own software, with the Blogger API, that is supported by most blogging software, you can use still other software to post and edit content on blogs
*** see the discussion in the comments of the linked Micropersuasion blog entry on when to call a blog either “fake” or “character”. I would use “fake” for blogs that are desperately trying to look authentic ;-)