Spam and Folksonomies

Wired has an article up on folksonomies. You may remember a post on this particular subject a few days ago, that gave a good breakdown of what folksonomies and tagging are...

What's interesting to me in this article is a point that Thomas Vander Wal, the guy credited with coining the term "folksonomy," brings up. He points out that "because Technorati's system works by having blog posts with embedded tags that point to Technorati, which in turn point back to the posts", it can be a big turn on for spammers.

This is one of the issues that I haven't heard much about in relation to tagging and folksonomies.

Tagging is so similar to the meta tags used early in the days of meta search. Why wouldn't this new tagging be subject to the same issues that caused the downfall of meta tags?

The answer is supposed to be because the community, not an individual, is tagging stuff. But that's not how some of these technologies actually work.

Let's say that I want to make money through affiliate programs, so I set up a blog that has posts for all the products I'm pushing. I get my blog in the Technorati mix, and start falsely tagging my posts for things like "Anna Kournikova" or "Tsunami Videos."

The rebuttal from Cory Doctorow is that when you go into Technorati's tag list, you see results from Technorati, del.icio.us, Flickr and Furl. Clearly, I would see results from many different places, and consensus would help guide my judgment. But this doesn't dispute the fact that tags for some of these services could be abused by "tag spammers."

I think the reason we aren't hearing much about this weakness is that not many ruthless affiliates, for example, have latched onto it. I think that in the very near future, however, we'll see both legitimate and fraudulent marketers using "tag spamming" on these services to their advantage.

Update: Check out Thomas Vander Wal's comments about this on his blog. He's able to clarify a bit more why del.icio.us seems to be doing it right, and how Technorati might be getting it wrong, and what can be done about it.