Tagging is on the Rise, is Spam next?

Posted by: Heather Green on May 24

David Sifry at Technorati reports that the blog search engine has reached a milestone of 1 million distinct tags and 14 million tagged posts.

Sifry dishes up a concise little explanation of tags in his post, describing why tags are important to his startup and pointing to a recent AP story about tagging. And he explains how Technorati became part of the tagging crowd, following in the footsteps of a gaggle of startups including del.icio.us, Furl, and Flickr in adopting the technology to search for and organize photos, URLs, etc.

Ok, so the question among the tagalicious critics has to be: “Millions of tags? When does the Spamfest start?” This is afterall, the cloud looming over the nascent, grassroots form of classifying data—and the startups who are building their models on it.

I know from my reporting that spam is already appearing within tags at Technorati. Flickr and Technorati use a combination of automatic filtering and manual removal to beat back spam.

I’m not an expert in spam, but this is what Sifry had to say about the future of it in a interview I did a couple of months ago for a story on tagging:

"It's a real, potential problem. We have all been around this block before (with email spam). The good news is that there is a difference between blog spam and email spam, with email spam you can do it anonymously, with blog spam in the end that spam is sitting at a url.

"The fact that I can identify it, means you can fight it in an effective manner. In the blog world, it has to have a url, you can say ah that's a spammer, the difference is its accountability."

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