Del.icio.us Spam
Last night while wasting time on the internet, I found this piece of delicious spam in my bloglines account. Why is it spam? Because it uses the most popular tags to generate traffice. The tags have little to do with the site posted.

The piece of spam had already been metioned in this blog post and on the del.icio.us discussion list. But last night was the first time I had ever seen it. And it shocked me. It really jumped out at me because it has 236 tags. (Or a huge number somewhere around there. I might have made a mistake or two while counting.) That is way too many tags.

I took a screenshot picture of the spam. The del.icio.us discussion list said the original spam had been deleted. So just in case there was a deletion, I wanted to remember how massive it was. And when most things I see take up only one line worth of tags, yes, this is massive.

I started thinking about what could be done about this. (Not that it is that big of a problem. Just kind of tacky for people to use the popular tags to get traffic to their site.)To my non-tech mind, it makes sense to flag someone anytime anyone posts a site with a certain number of tags. But what number would that be? What would be the maximum number of tags that one website would need to have? Certainly much less than 236. I went back to the delicious pilot study to see if it found out the average number of tags per post. No luck. That would be interesting to know. 236. Thats ridiculous.

Technorati Tags: tags, tagging, del.icio.us, delicious, spam
- posted by Alicia @ 9:26 PM