Spamming del.icio.us - Judge, Jury, Executioner

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Fri, 05/27/2005 - 2:40pm.

brainstorms posted an article about a company named Airset that spammed the tag manager del.icio.us. The funny thing is that along the way they forgot to look at the most obvious reason why this happened.

brainstorm noticed that a bunch of new del.icio.us users were linking to Airset with similar tags. 22 people in fact had used similar tags when bookmarking Airset in del.icio.us.

The logical conclusion was that this was spamming the tagging system. This is interesting as I discussed tag system spamming in a previous post.

In the comments section, Patrick Hurley who works for Airset commented (excerpt):

I just opened up a delicious account very recently which is why I only have one entry. I certainly plan to add more when I have time to test it out and see if I like it. I felt nothing wrong with designating AirSet as my first bookmark -- kind of like typing your own name into Google on your first visit and seeing the results -- and tried to assign relevant tags.

I think something like EVDB is definitely a relevant tag as it is in the public event calendaring space and we're in the personal event calendaring space. A person interested in one could easily conceivably be interested in the other as complementary services. I think my tags are relevant or I wouldn't have included them. It's not as if I included a tag for Xbox or Podcast or something else that are very topical but not in any way relevant to AirSet.

I encouraged some of my colleagues to open delicious accounts to get a sense for another beta collaboration service (some already had accounts) and to slug AirSet in as one of their bookmarks (looks like in their haste that almost all of them used nearly the exact same tags). Also, we only have about 10 or 11 employees and I don't think they all opened delicious accounts so I can't explain why there are 22 people who referenced AirSet. I'll look at the full list of names when I have a second.

Imagine that. Someone finds something cool on the internet and shares it with colleagues.

In the blogging world people are very quick to become the judge, jury and executioner when they notice things. I've been guilty of this in terms of Movable Type and Firefox.

This is because in blogging your first instinct is to use the tools you have. Your blog. We've moved from emailing people to posting on blogs.

In this case I can understand Patrick Hurley's explanation. When we rolled out RSS to our teams we suggested using Bloglines for feed management. Included in that package was a set number of preinstalled feeds for people to use. If you had looked at our team member's public pages you would have seen we all subscribed to the same feeds.