JG etc.

Matt Mullenweg, on the latest Om and Niall podcast, said that Web 2.0 is a vector for spam. In a lot of ways I totally agree with him and many of the larger companies that are benefiting from this spam are the same companies that are making web 2.0 tools that allow spammers to thrive. Mullenweg pointed out that Google Pages is being used for spam along with Yahoo groups.

Competing with Free

This is what is so crazy about Microsoft changing their business to advertising, and building out their online infrastructure/webOS much like Google. What happens when they shift all their products online and allow people to create content easily and for free? Sure there will be good content and cool tools, but there will be a hell of a lot of spam as well.

I’m starting to recognize the need for independence between the content creating tools and ad networks. I would venture to predict there will come a time when there will be fines for blog service providers that have ads on their spam sites that are from their ad networks. (So Google would be fined for adsense ads on Blogger spam sites). There is a serious conflict of interest to own both types of businesses. The perfect example of this is Wordpress.com and Blogger.com. Wordpress shuts down the spam blogs, Blogger makes money off them. Kill the incentive, kill spam. Doesn’t get much easier than that.

Another gem from Matt was that he thought there are only about 5 million relevant blogs in the ‘blogosphere’. I think this pays further credence to how an intelligent index, an example could be Feedburner, is really a better index to draw from than trying to create and work with a the massive infrastructure that is full of irrelevance and spam.

Niall Kennedy, from his post:

With the recent integration of blog search results to mainstream media sites such as Time.com and the Associated Press blog spam now has a new level of visibility and motive for attack. Hopefully startup companies are keeping on top of the problem and related items for “Bush” won’t be overwhelmed with camgirls.

Nick Bradbury adds to the mix:

Any new Web 2.0 company that hasn’t considered the spam problem automatically isn’t worth my time.