Weblog Spam
Mark Pilgrim,
Dive Into Mark,
Nov 17, 2003
I have tried to convince bloggers that push-style APIs (such as ping, trackback, and the like) are the wrong way to go, without much success. Some early spam seemed to vindicate me, but then came the anti-spam manifesto and a new blacklist. Round one for the bloggers, right? No. I agree wholeheartedly with Mark Pilgrim: "No offense to Jay or all the people who have contributed to the list so far, but how quaint! I mean really. Savor this moment, folks. You can tell your children stories of how, back in the early days of weblogging, you could print out the entire spam blacklist on a single sheet of paper. Maybe with two or three columns and a smallish font, but still. Boy, those were the days. And they won’t last. They absolutely won’t last." There's a simple logic here, one which the blog technologists ignored: you have to choose your content. That's why blogs were (are) so great: you could subscribe to a blog and get the great content without the garbage. But as soon as you let in the unsolicited content, spam arrives. As Pilgrim says, "It’s all been done. It’s all been done before, and it was completely all-consuming, and it still didn’t work."
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