Stopping blog spam
On average a new blog is created every second. One in five of these is a spam blog.
If you chart the growth of blogs and associated spam, you'll find that spam grows faster than proper content.
The spam blogs ("splog") are often made from stolen content and contain a large amount of URLs to drive traffic and search engine rank. Blog comment spam has the same purpose.
We often discuss how to get rid of this spam. Today's solutions mostly fail since techniques used to combat mail spam don't work well for blog spam: white- and blacklists have legal and moral issues and blog network propagation is different from email's store-and-forward topology.
In essence, this is a problem about trust. If there is a way to assign levels of trust to blog content and coments, then the recipient can automatically weed out the wheat from the chaff. An old trust solution is to use PKI, but that idea is difficult to implement in the blogosphere with its explosive growth. No PKI administrator can successfully handle hundreds of thousands of new certificates a day.
But public keys are still usable. We have created a system where we combine the power of public key cryptography to assert ownership of comments as well as content. The system can also tie into a PKI-like trust hierarchy if so desired by its users.
The system is specified on http://signedping.com, where you can find specifications as well as freely available source code, blog platform plugins, pass-thru services, etc., to start experimenting.
Initial response to the signedping has been very positive and we're working with some of the world's big blog producers to expand this concept. We'd love to hear what you think.
