Technorati CEO David Sifry spoke at Northern Voice today: spam.corporate extortion using network bandwidth and Google Bowling are threats.
Spam – As Cory Doctorow says, all healthy ecosystems have parasites. The good news here is that in the end it all goes back to a web page somewhere, so in a sense it’s accountable. We still have a very strong signal to noise ratio. Search companies and blog hosting companies are talking to each other
to fight blog spam. The companies can shut down blog farms and AdSense
abusers who scrape content and set up blogs with stolen copyrighted
content.
Bandwidth Extortion — One of most dangerous threats to the Net: the number of telecom providers is shrinking. We have given the telecoms a local monopoly. Now they’re saying they want to introduce preferential service for those who are their direct customers.
The breakage of traditional Net infrastructure is bad for innovation. Smaller companies can’t afford to pay the predatory pricing taht the telcos are suggesting (protection money for best bandwidth access). The bandwith providers are going to go behind the scenes and get protection money from big companies that want to have preferential treatment on the Internet.
Google Bowling — This scares Sifry more than secret blog networks boosting a site’s Google Juice. The Google Bowlers discredit those sites that rank ahead of them on the search engines, by targeting their competitors with links that get them booted out of search engines. The net effect is that the Bowler’s favoured site moves up in the ranking, without appearing to have done anything unfair to improve their search engine ranking.
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Sifry says that Technorati has been tracking blogs since Nov. 2002, and the numbers have
been doubling every five months over the past few years. This can’t go on. It can’t continue to
grow forever, but he thinks things are still growing.