Jun 24 2007

Spam Tagging on MyBlogLog

Published by at 8:48 pm under blogging,mybloglog,social media

I thought I’d have a look for blogs tagged with “Australia” on MyBlogLog today, and one jumped out at me for obvious reasons – Meg_From_Australia. I thought I’d drop in to say “g’day” to another Aussie Meg :)

However, this is what I found.

mblgodzillachai.gif

Notice this user doesn’t have a blog, has no friends except for Eric, and has been tagged (by user Godzilla) with “Godzillachai.blogspot.com”. I thought that looked a little odd. Then I discovered at least one hundred blogs that had all been tagged “Godzillachai.blogspot.com” – and the overwhelming majority of them had been tagged by Godzilla.

mblgodzilla2.gif

Now Godzilla seems to be a genuine daddy blogger and very active in the MyBlogLog community – having joined 669 communities, with 370 friends and 514 members in the godzillachai community. He also has an impressive Technorati rank of 14,951.

mblgodzillachaicommunity.gif

My last post discussed the credibility of a blogger. Behaviour like this does nothing to enhance credibility. Either this blogger has been the victim of an unfortunate smear campaign, or he’s putting his reputation on the line by abusing the tagging system.

This situation also highlights the pitfalls of folksonomy.

8 responses so far

8 Responses to “Spam Tagging on MyBlogLog”

  1. # Robyn Tippinson 26 Jun 2007 at 4:29 am

    Thanks, we appreciate you pointing this out. We are taking care of this now :)

  2. # Andy Beardon 27 Jun 2007 at 1:56 am

    I sent some horrible MFA sites through to Eric not long ago, not sure if he is taking some well deserved R&R as he normally replies.
    It was slightly obvious, they were being listed as the hot communities at the time.

    There is still a site that has been banned by Google and effectively (at least as determined by many bloggers) a splog in the Top50 communities

  3. # Megon 27 Jun 2007 at 12:14 pm

    Hi Robyn

    Thanks for being so responsive.

    Andy,

    Hope Eric gets back to you – splogs in the top 50 are not good…

  4. # John Lampardon 27 Jun 2007 at 12:36 pm

    I’ve had a few instances where some MBL members with established profiles (not empty “sock puppet” profiles) have added their MBL username as a tag to my tag set (which I remove or hide) … that’s a little cheeky, unless I’ve missed something I thought the tags were meant to be relevant to the MBL profile owner not someone else!

  5. # Megon 27 Jun 2007 at 12:43 pm

    John

    I agree that is cheeky.

    Whilst the ability to add tags is great – I wonder whether the function should be restricted to the profile or community owner. This would remove the temptation (and of course ability) to “spam tag”. We shouldn’t have to continually monitor our tags to make sure that no one is adding inappropriate tags.

    Thanks for dropping by :)

  6. # Community Messages on MyBlogLog | Dipping into the Blogpondon 30 Jun 2007 at 3:17 pm

    […] an aside – I wrote about spam tagging of MyBlogLog communities the other day, and have noticed there is (now?) a profile option where you can restrict who can tag […]

  7. # Destyon 02 Jul 2007 at 4:29 am

    That user avatar looks familar. I received a link exchange from that person. I checked out his blog, alot of videos about dragons, mostly asian focus. While that might interesting to somepeople, it really didn’t fit in with what Desty Online does (helping small business owners along with bloggers become better business people), so I just ignored the request. I don’t feel so bad now.

  8. # Blog Karma and Blogging Benevolence - the role of the blog itselfon 05 Jul 2007 at 8:06 pm

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