Yahoo MyWeb Becomes a Haven for Tag Spam

In a little more than a week since it launched, Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0 social search engine has already become a haven for tag spam. A closer examination of the most popular tags reveals that crapware, nhw: bad crapware, nhw: bad and nhw: dangerous are among the leaders of the nearly 34,000 pages filed away and categorized on MyWeb 2.0. Each of these tags is filled with link spam. This provide a stark contrast to the most popular tags on del.icio.us. More fodder for the skeptics out there. I hope Yahoo can remedy this fast because it's a pretty promising tool, although it still needs some work.

Comments

[Constantin Basturea]

It looks like all the spam tags that you've noticed were posted by one person ("Carlo Zottman"). And they are so prominent because My Web is less than a week old.

[Peter Caputa]

Why would a spammer tag his posts with "bad" as a tag?

Seems kinda like shooting himself in the foot.

[Natasha Robinson]

Steve,

I'm not exactly sure that I would consider this spam.

Let's suppose that you are a user of Yahoo's MyWeb 2.0 and you are using the system as a personal sorting system of webs pages (as I use tags) and in the case of the example above you are documenting bad sites, would that be considered spam? And who decides?

Me'thinks I hear another “Tagging & Relevancy” debate brewing.

As I like to say “One person’s Tags are another person’s spam, are another person’s TagVertising.”

Natasha “That Girl From Marketing” Robinson

[BillSaysThis]

Rather than being spam this seems to be an effort to transfer the contents of the AGNIS Adblock list (https://netfiles.uiuc.edu/ehowes/www/resource.htm#AGNIS) into the Yahoo database as a pre-emptive move. Which would explain the negative tags too.

[sujal Shah]

Actually, this is benign compared to the stuff I'm seeing in Technorati. If you have an RSS watchlist for some popular tags, you'll find blogs that are misbehaving either accidently or intentionally that fill the tag results with that blogs posts. Some of these (most, actually) seem to be automatic blogs that seem to watch feeds from popular sites and then either republish the content or publish pointers as a unique post. That's spam and that's annoying. I'll dig up some examples in a bit and post them to my blog or here in the comments.

[Jeremy Zawodny]

Yeah, I agree with the others.

Steve: you seem a bit too willing to yell spam in a crowded tag map. This guy is tagging sites the way he wants. What's the big deal. If you don't like his tags, don't associate with him.

[Steve Rubel]

Thanks all. I see your point but I wish Yahoo would provide a way for users to ensure that they don't see certain links posted by users they don't trust when they're viewing the community cloud.

On a related note, I heard from the person who posted all of these links that he is tinkering with MyWeb2.0 and by accident imported all his browser bookmarks into the larger community. Still, it does expose a big hole in all of these tagging sites.

[startplane]

What yahoo can do is make an algorithm that only adds the most trusted user's (the users with the most friends, etc.) tags to the tag cloud. Say take only the top 10% of users based on how many other users "trust" them.

[Arnab]

All the tags seem to be created by a "Carlo Zottman". I don't know if it's the same guy, but the Carlo Zottman I know is responsible for, amongst other things Wakkawiki, the most forked PHP wiki project on the net, Feedapalooza, RSS source for hundreds of non RSS webpages, Watchcow.net, and a large number of useful greasemonkey scripts.

Not the average spammer, I guess :)

[RG]

I'm sorry, but maybe I'm slow. Exactly what is the impact of the "tag spam" on a user? I guess I don't get why it affects me when I'm searching about.

[Steve]

Yahoo have never been a favourite - I generally treat it like AOL: some kind of indescribable digital evil that is occasionaly tolerated but never fostered.

If they're going to be a spam haven, then unlucky for everyone who thought Yahoo ever had anything worthwhile to offer.

I'll stick with del.icio.us for my random pages and google with everything else...

[Joe Beaulaurier]

Steve said in his comment, "I wish Yahoo would provide a way for users to ensure that they don't see certain links posted by users they don't trust when they're viewing the community cloud."

The answer to that is to use "My Community's Pages." Those are the people you trust, no?

"Everyone's Pages" is the wild and 'caveat emptor' is the smart approach there

[Otis]

Even if those are spam tags (and it looks like they relaly are not), who cares about EVERYONE's tags? Tags that are important are those of people you trust, like Joe said above.
Take a look at Simpy's Topics, as it helps with precisely that problem.
URL: http://simpy.com

[oh!my god]

it sucks!!!
i love yahoo

shenquanqi1@yahoo.com

[d.durand]

Did you check out announcement of "Tag for Two" by del.icio.us ?(http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/07/tags_for_two.html)

isn't it also an open door for tag spammers?

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