43 Things Neighborhood Watch: Member Voting to Manage Spam

Since its roll out in December of 2004, 43 Things has won a webby, experienced steady growth and most importantly, formed a very engaged and interactive community of users who volunteer to help garden the community. Though it keeps a low profile, 43 Things is a community success story - they're approaching their millionth member and "thing".

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Is This The New Spam?

In preparing my last post on MyBlogLog giveaways, I came across a few "make money online" kinds of sites. Specifically, I ran across John Chow who has been quite successful in monetizing his blog - he made $7000 in February. John has become popular among beginning bloggers and SEO (search engine optimization) people.

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You Can't Build Community with a Carrot

I was recently pointed to Existential Ventures, where Broc is giving away a printer to one of the first 500 people who join his MyBlogLog "community". His inspiration was John Chow and apparently NetBusinessBlog joined in to. It looks like John has been able to drive the numbers of his MyBlogLog community to over 1000 people. John gave away a flash drive.

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The Most Expensive Spam

Spam has been around for a lot longer than computers or email, but we’ve gotten used to it. Ever since I had a real world mailbox, it’s been filled with spam every day. A percentage of my phone calls are spam. Some might even say that billboards on the side of a highway are some sort of road spam, or maybe not.

Mailbox spam is expensive. It wastes resources to print all those brochures that I just recycle immediately (which takes time). Phone spam costs a little of my time and there is a certain annoyance cost.

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I'm so honored

It's a big day at Common Craft headquarters. Today this site received it's first wave of good ole trackback spam. I'm surprised it took so long and I seem to be very popular among the comment spammers.

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Online Vermin and Refactoring Weblogs

There’s a lot going on out there and I wish I had more time to take it all in. I’m about to leave town tomorrow morning for a bachelor party so I’m posting the bare minimum here. A couple of things that caught my eye recently:

Amy Gahran has been posting a series called Handling Porcupines, Trolls, and Other Online Vermin that is about understanding and working with people who have poor online communication skills.

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Comment Spam Fighting Strategy

As you know, I've been been pretty fed up with the comment spammers. I have now chosen not to be a pawn in their silly game any longer.

I have now closed the comments on all but the most recent posts on this site. As it is now, any post that is over 15 days old has the comments "closed". So far, I haven't seen comment spam at all since closing these comments.

I'm betting that the lecherous spam-bots focus on archived posts more than current ones. Perhaps their system looks for posts that are over 30 days old. I'm hoping to find the sweet-spot where I can keep posts open for a maximum amount of time without attracting spam.

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Pew Internet and American Life Report on Spam

Pew Internet & American Life Project: spam

This report on spam was just released and paints a sobering picture of how Spam is affecting the public's perception of email.

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Bill Gates Says Email Not Dead.

Informatics: Gates foretells death of spam

Ok, he didn't say those exact words, but he's a believer that technology will eventually beat spammers. He recently spoke at ITU Telecom World 2003 in Geneva.

He called on anonymity to be removed from internet protocols like SMTP, because it allows spammers to mimic other users, and suggested that passwords could be replaced by smart cards and biometric technologies.

"We have to know who is accessing the network. By being able to identify who the sender is we will be able to make the spam problem essentially go away," he said.

 

Let's hope he's right.

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