Splogging Along

by Peter Saint-Andre

2005-08-19

In the beginning there was spam. Then there was spim: spam over IM. Then there was spit: spam over Internet telephony. As Doc notes, now there are splogs: spam blogs. Mark Cuban observes:

We are exploring a variety of options. The blog hosts can obviously help, but I think the best solution will come from the pinging process that is used to let blog search engines know a new post has been added. If blogging is supposed to be a personal medium, I dont know why we can't use an email confirmation for blog posts. We do it for comments to keep out comment spam. Why not do it for blog posts?

Seems like we need a strong concept of identity here, eh? The blog hosts, for instance, could verify a person's identity using a system like Passel before allowing them to create a blog. As to blog pings, if folks used the Atom-over-XMPP protocol then aggregators would have a verified identity for the poster; alternatively, aggregators could require that the poster push the update to an HTTP URL that requires sign-in using Passel. Granted, we could do all this using PKI if everyone had X.509 certificates or PGP keys, but that's unlikely to happen anytime soon -- it's more likely that the much-ballyhoed "identity layer" for the Internet will emerge first (heck, even the Mozilla folks are getting into the act).


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