Trust and comment-spamming in the Blogosphere
It occurs to me that there is a large amount of trust of total strangers within the blogosphere. I am thinking in terms of the room for abuse of the information and services provided by weblogs and webloggers. It would be relatively easy for someone reading a weblog to saturate a post with useless messages, to copy an email address and use it on various spam sites in a malicious way. Yet this doesn’t happen (at least from what I’ve heard). Ok, so some people get their comments spammed every now and again, but vindictive acts rarely occur. I realise that I’m probably asking for it now, but then again what would be the point of doing that to someone like me? (Unless I’ve really pissed someone off). I’ve got a fairly obscure weblog that is in no way near the heights reached by some of the power-bloggers. But yet, nothing ever really happens to their blogs either. And what about celebrity blogs (or celeblogs)? Surely they’re vulnerable to spam attacks and stalkers. Yet again, as far I know, this rarely happens. Is this a testimony of the kindness of the human spirit demonstrating that such vindictive people are, in fact, quite rare? Or is it something implicitly built into the weblog world that makes such attacks worthless or too much effort?
Although there have been murmurings of comment-spam attacks on some weblogs, I can’t really see that causing much of a threat in the near future. I base this on the fact that widely distributing comments to a number of blogs in a short space of time is really time-consuming. There doesn’t seem to be a way of doing it as easily as in say, email, where you can simply type in an address to a mailing list and click send. At the moment, blogs are built on a number of different platforms, some hosted, some not, and not all blogs have comments (most of the free, hosted ones don’t – and I’d guess that the vast majority of weblogs are free, hosted ones). Not only that, but the majority of weblogs only have nano-audiences. This (I assume, perhaps naively) makes mass-comment-spamming a fairly difficult process to automate. So all that is left are the power-bloggers at the top of the blogging power law chart.
These are the people that may experience problems. Being at the top of the power curve, they’ve got the highest quotient of readers, and therefore are the most attractive to comment-spammers. As such, when they make noise about being comment-spammed, being power-bloggers, that noise gets carried quickly around the blogosphere, when, in fact, it’s not going to affect the vast majority of bloggers.
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