There’s a little bit of an arguement between Steve Rubel and the Yahoo Search Blog as to whether Yahoo’s My Web 2.0 has been co-opted by massive spamming.
While, at first glance, the tags Steve points to (crapware, nhw: bad crapware, nhw: bad and nhw: dangerous) seem just crap spam, I’m inclined to agree with YSearchBlog’s assertion that this is not spam, but a bit of an accident, and Steve seems to confirm as such.
As explained by one comment, all of these pages have been tagged by one Carlo Zottman, and the contents are strikingly similar to the AGNIS Adblock list. Steve says later in a comment:
Thanks all. I see your point but I wish Yahoo would provide a way for users to ensure that they don’t see certain links posted by users they don’t trust when they’re viewing the community cloud.
On a related note, I heard from the person who posted all of these links that he is tinkering with MyWeb2.0 and by accident imported all his browser bookmarks into the larger community. Still, it does expose a big hole in all of these tagging sites.
So, what we’ve got here is an example of how a single person can overwhelm a new tagging site. Yahoo says that there have been 37,231 saved pages tagged with 14,098 tags. Conceivably, I could tag three hundred pages with “Nathan Weinberg is the coolest” and that would become one of the most popular tags. Good thing this should dissapear if My Web becomes a lot more popular.
You know, if I were an evil company, I’d realize I could kill this Yahoo service by having one employee tag all day with completely irrelevant pages. I’d have to start immediately, however.
Steve Rubel’s Post
Yahoo’s Response
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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