Even though we have lots of tools to detect blog comment spam these days, spammers always tend to be one step ahead of our algorithms. While early blog spam was often posted by robots and easily detectable, today’s blog spammers are smarter. Instead of relying on robots, the team behind Automaticc’s Akismet spam filter reports that modern blog spam is often written by low-paid workers in India, South-East Asia and Turkey.

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The “best written spam,” according to Akismet, comes from South-East Asia. As the Akismet team notes, SEO firms will often hire these low-paid workers and set them up to work out of Internet cafes and local universities.

Detecting Human-Posted Spam is Hard

We have definitely seen this increase in human-posted spam here at ReadWriteWeb over the last two years or so. While early comment spam was easily detectable because it had nothing to do with the actual post, we now have to take a closer look at all the links our commenters use in their personal profiles in order to weed out the spammers. Often, comments that look perfectly legit will include a link to a Viagra or SEO site in the profile link.

What About Regular Spam?

Besides the rise of human-powered spam, traditional spam is still going strong as well. Akismet notes that “old-fashioned” pill, porn and malware spam still tends to originate from Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation. Spammers there still operate huge networks of malware-infected machines that run spambots.

According to Akismet, the number of fake blog networks on services like Blogspot, Weebly, Tumblr, Ning and WordPress is also becoming more frequent and more highly organized. Instead of just abusing other people’s blogs, these spammers just create their own blog networks.

Other forms of blog-related spam that are on the rise are auto-blog pingbacks from people using auto-blogging plugins (mostly for WordPress sites), as well as hijacked blogs and wikis.

From Porn and Pills to Pet Food and Roofing

Akismet also notes that while early blog spammers used to focus on the traditional (and highly lucrative) niches around pornography, pills and malware, today’s spammers are often more interested in search engine optimization than hawking fake Viagra. Because of this, modern blog spam often includes links to “dentists, roofing and pet food.”

Discuss

Given the recent developments in the Twitter developer ecosystem, I think it’s a good time to revisit the idea of an open Web alternative to Twitter.

The fact is, the differences between microblogging and normal blogging are insignificant. I’m going to detail five of the differences. My point in doing so is to illustrate that the best way to bootstrap an open alternative to Twitter is not by inventing a bunch of new technologies or products. Instead, I want to show that most of the pieces already exist in the current blogging ecosystem. With a few modifications, a distributed microblogging ecosystem can easily emerge.

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Guest author Chris Saad is VP of strategy at Echo, the world’s leading provider of comment/conversation technology to Tier 1 publishers. His role is to track trends in the marketplace, listen to and participate in the community and translate those needs into actionable product direction. His background includes co-authoring of the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) specification, and co-founding the DataPortability Project. Used by Digg, BBC, NewsGator, France Telecom and others, APML is industry standard for Attention Profiles. The DataPortability project’s mission is to advocate interoperable data portability for users, developers and vendors.

Length

Microblogs are, well, micro. They are shorter. This is not some marvelous invention – it is a simple, imposed limitation on the input field. Any publishing software today, from Wordpress to Drupal, can be modified to force users to stick to 140 characters – call it “microblogging mode”. I don’t think this particular difference (or how to bridge it) warrants much more explanation.

Real Time

While blogs used to update rather slowly in a publish and subscribe model, microblogging has had a reputation for being faster or real time. The old school refresh rate of 15 minutes or more (the time between RSS refreshes) seems like an eternity these days.

Of course the reality is that the Twitter API is still incapable of sending updates to individual clients in real time, and the whole thing is far from real time. Updates in seconds, however, is a key trait of microbogging.

The fact is, however, that blogs now have a method of pushing updates that’s faster and more effective than even the Twitter API. It’s an open standard called PubSubHub and it’s supported by both Blogger, Wordpress, Buzz and countless other smaller services.

Blogs are already real time.

Identified Subscriptions

One of the nice things that Twitter does that traditional Blogging software does not do is called Identified Subscriptions. That is, when you subscribe to (a.k.a follow) a user, their name and face appear in your sidebar, and you get a nice little ego boost in the form of a notification email and increase in your follower count.

Why couldn’t we add a simple mechanism to PubSubHub so that when a client subscribes to push updates, it leaves behind some optional identifying information about the user like their name and avatar? Or maybe instead of leaving the actual username and avatar, it might provide a URL to the subscribing user’s own microblogging site that has that metadata stored in the header.

Addressability

This is perhaps the most complicated difference and gap to close. With Twitter, you can easily say, “Hey @chrissaad you are are a crazy hippy” and I will get it in my message stream.

Blogs can’t do that right?

Well, actually, blogs have been doing addressability since day zero. The same way the rest of the Web does addressability – using links. Bloggers frequently link to each other and then check their trackbacks and pingbacks for incoming references.

The only problem with this model is that it’s not user friendly enough. Mainstream users don’t understand URLs and checking pingback and referrer logs is just plain silly.

So rather than reinvent the wheel, why not just add rubber?

To make it easier for users, imagine if blogging software kept track of the users you were following (see Identified Subscriptions above) and when you type the equivalent of “@”, they provided a list of suggested aliases to choose from. When you select the person you are addressing, the software could insert the alias and hyperlink the name to the associated URL of that user’s microblogging site.

Clients, then, could subscribe to Google Blog Search (remember blog search is essentially the blogging world’s open firehose) and search for any reference to your personal URL.

The rest is just presentation tricks to show those replies mixed in with the rest of your microblogging items.

Clients

Why can’t existing Twitter clients allow users to subscribe to PubSubHub enabled RSS and Atom feeds. They would also subscribe to the Google Blog Search for references to your own URL (for @ replies). No need to rip and replace Twitter, just offer an open alternative: subscribe to any site – anywhere.

The Future

As you can see here, microblogging is and could be fundamentally the same as blogging in terms of the mechanics and technologies involved. The techniques used to build and improve the open blogosphere could be used to bootstrap a microblogging sphere as well.

There have been many big strides in this area, such as Status.net. The opportunity now is for the (ex?) Twitter clients and blog publishing platforms and the standards groups to make small tweaks to extend the technology in the right way.
Discuss

If you’ve ever done SXSW before, then you know about the music here in Austin. If you haven’t, let us tell you now – there’s a lot. But how do you find it all? And how do you find out which show is best? And how do you share blogs, photos, videos and tweet about it all at once?

SuperGlued, which has integrated with both Foursquare and Twitter, will be your your one-stop shop for the more than 1,200 bands that are set to invade Austin over the next week and a half.

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SuperGlued is a can’t-miss app for navigating SXSW without having the schizophrenically switch between iPhone apps just to keep up. With the release of a new version of its iPhone app, users can find shows, buy tickets, tweet and read what others are tweeting, post photos and check-in to Foursquare. And if you find yourself at a lame show, the new “Where My Friends At” feature will let you know what shows your friends are seeing so you can ask them if it’s any better.

A new partnership with BandsInTown not only helps the service find all the shows going on, but lets you buy tickets from your iPhone. And for special events, like SXSW, Superglued brings all the shows together into a separate event listing.

Aside from the iPhone app, the website lets you continue to interact around the shows you’ve seen long after they’ve ended. Rush Doshi, who co-founded SuperGlued with Gawker CTO Tom Plunkett, told us on the phone the other day that SuperGlued is the water cooler for everyone to gather around and talk about that crazy show they saw last week.

“The idea came about from going to a lot of shows and wondering about who else was there – it just seemed that there was no one place to go to see what everyone else thought,” said Doshi. “We built SuperGlued to be that place.”

SuperGlued connects with Flickr, YouTube, Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr, so when the shows all over, you can both add and check out blog posts, videos, set lists and more from the website.

Doshi told us that they have made extra efforts to make sure that all of the SXSW shows are list, but if a show isn’t there, users can add shows via the website. With the number of shows springing up in parking lots and backyards, this is a must-have feature. In the near future, the company is looking to include show-specific merchandise in its iPhone app, letting you browse and even order show merchandise from your phone and having it shipped to your house.

Beyond SXSW, SuperGlued is available around the world with nearly 200,000 show listings, many of which it pulls from BandInTown and Last.fm, in 140 countries. So, wherever you are, get off your duff, download the iPhone app and go see some live music.

Discuss

Here at ReadWriteStart, we’ve been following the Open Angel Forum closely as Jason Calacanis’ project moves from city to city bringing angel investors and worthy startups together in one room. The first event in Los Angeles was of particular success to Backupify, which provides backup for your online social network data, including Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, Wordpress, Gmail, Basecamp and many other services. Following the event, the company raised a Series A round of $900,000 from Calacanis, Chris Sacca, First Round Capital and a few others.

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Earlier this week, CEO Rob May posted his take on the process of raising funding from VCs, which he likens to dating. According to May, pitching to VCs is not about forcing your idea down their throat and convincing them why they should invest in it; if a startup and a VC are meant to be, it will be more like love at first sight.

“They either like you and your idea, or they don’t. It’s like dating because your goal in dating is not to convince someone who is a bad match for you that somehow you are really a good match. That’s a recipe for divorce,” says May. “It’s really about finding the person that is naturally a good match. Same way with investors.”

One thing that May did much differently than other entrepreneurs seeking funding is that he approached investors without a business plan. While he doesn’t recommend this as a solution for every startup, he does find that in his case, not having a business plan did not really hinder his efforts.

“I sat in front of VCs who thought I was crazy for not having a business plan. I was asked ‘how can you run your business if you don’t have a written plan?’,” says May. “I also sat in front of VCs who said ‘glad you didn’t waste time writing a plan, because we wouldn’t read it anyway.’ It’s really more of an art, not a science.”

Another less standard practice May chose to include in his presentation at the Open Angel Forum was not a special slide on his pitch deck or a certain phrase; May drank a beer while presenting. Again, he doesn’t suggest this is a solution for everyone, but he uses it as an example of how to relax and “be yourself” when pitching to VCs. They are very experienced at talking to startups and any good VC knows how to spot when you are full of hot air, and they will call you on it.

“It’s never easy, not even when you have a good idea. That’s the point. That’s why so few people ever do it,” says May. “If you want to learn to raise money, the best thing to do is go try to raise money.”

Photo by Flickr user apol3.

Discuss

Cliqset is a Florida-based technology startup that end-users have had a hard time understanding. The company just released a new product that developers should have no trouble with at all and that could send waves of innovation across the social web.

Called Cliqset FeedProxy, the service consumes user activity feeds from more than 70 online services like Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Last.fm, Yelp and LibraryThing and then produces an outbound feed that’s compliant with the ActivityStreams standard format.

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That means activities from all those services can be read in a common language and 3rd party services can slice and dice them to create new user experiences. Several high-profile applications have already begun consuming activity feeds republished through Cliqset and the company says many more consumers are in the works.

The most common analogy for explaining the impact of data standards is the history of the railroads in the US. When all the railroad networks adopted a standard size of track, then transport companies could carry goods cross-country over multiple rail networks. That opened up a new world of commerce.

ActivityStreams is an Atom feed standard under development by many social web companies large and small. It aims to normalize the language that user activities are expressed in across multiple social networks. It’s intended to facilitate interoperability and cross-network delivery of user activity payloads. It’s important, exciting and inspiring work.

Non-standardized activity feed publishing is like creating a high-way that only one brand of car can drive on, with one proscribed type of journey in mind. Standardized feed publishing provides a platform for a world of open innovation.

Facebook, MySpace, Netflix and other services are already making user data available in ActivityStreams format, but there are far more social networks that don’t.

As we explained in the ReadWriteWeb research report The Real-Time Web and its Future:

An extension of the Atom feed format, the spec explains it like this: “An activity is a description of an action that was performed (the verb) at some instant in time by some actor (the subject), usually on some social object (the object). An activity feed is a feed of such activities.”

In the current draft spec, you can perform such actions as Post, Share, Save, Mark as Favorite, Play, Start Following, Make Friend, Join and Tag Object. An Object could be an Article, Blog Entry, Note, File, Photo, Photo Album, Playlist, Video, Audio, Bookmark, Person, Group, Place or Comment. These actions can have such contexts as Location, Mood and Annotation. Stream aggregator Cliqset publishes Activity Streams feeds that don’t require API authentication to view. You can see a sample one at:
http://cliqset.com/feed/atom?uid=dbounds.

The aim of Activity Streams is to have multiple social networks use a common language and have a common understanding of what all those things mean, so that messages can be read across different networking sites.

Now the Cliqset FeedProxy tool will normalize feeds from more than 70 other services into new feeds in the ActivityStreams format. It may just be an initial inroad to interoperability between these networks, provided by a 3rd party and not yet extensively used – but it’s an important step none the less.

What does this mean? It means that applications developers could build interfaces to display books read, music listened to, reviews written and more across multiple different services with as much ease as they can display standard RSS or Atom feeds today. It’s a powerful new level of granularity.

Social media center Boxee and a Sun Microsystems community product currently consume activity feeds. Cliqset says many more projects are in development now.

As the ActivityStreams community builds out more sophistication in the standard, there may be things like cross-site reputation included in such feeds.

Cliqset has done a valuable service creating these normalized feeds for developers, but the obvious downside is the reliance on a middleman. Cliqset says it is talking to Superfeedr about creating some real-time feeds as well. That would be great, but would be another layer on top of existing publisher feeds.

Perhaps if the developer community builds the kind of market-moving applications and features ActivityStreams advocates expect from the Cliqset feets, more publishers will begin publishing standardized feeds natively. While Cliqset has put a lot of work into normalizing numerous network feeds, the idea behind standards is that they can facilitate technical integration between parties with no prior knowledge of each other.

Either way, Cliqset is putting the ActivityStreams agenda to the test. The company’s release could have some very significant consequences.

Discuss

The estimates for cloud computing can make you wonder sometimes about what to believe. Analyst firms and it looks like investment houses, can be notorious for wild estimates about market sizes.

So we have to wonder about the estimates from Merrill Lynch, which is estimating the cloud computing market to reach $160 billion by 2011.The estimate includes $95 billion in business and productivity applications.

Whoa! That makes cloud computing one of the fastest growing markets in the world.

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But Merrill Lynch is not alone in its lofty estimates. Earlier this year, Gartner pegged the market at $150 billion by 2013.

In their estimate, Gartner included Google Ad Words estimates in their estimates. This seems sketchy at best. Here’s what Gartner analyst Lydia Leong wrote back in May:

“Obviously, one argue whether or not it’s valid to include advertising revenue, but a key point that should not be missed is that in the trend towards the consumerization of IT, it is the advertiser that often implicitly pays for the consumer’s use of an IT service, rather than the consumer himself. Advertising revenue is a significant component of the overall market, part of the “cloud” phenomenon even if you don’t necessarily think of it as “computing”.

What’s at risk is making cloud computing totally irrelevant. How can corporate IT departments make sense of the market when it appears that cloud computing is essentially tied to anything connected to the Internet?

But then you need to look at the dynamics in play. IT is built on legacy systems, custom, built to order environments. Cloud computing provides a level of automation.

From the PriceWaterhouseCoopers summer Technology Forecast:

“Legacy IT soaks up much of the available IT budget and is a primary barrier to IT responsiveness and overall business agility.”

The report goes on to say that cloud will be necesssary for automating the world of IT:

“…IT must adopt an architecture that creates loose coupling between the IT infrastructure and application workloads. It also must modernize and automate IT’s own internal business processes for provisioning, managing, and orchestrating infrastructure resources.”

In other words, cloud computing will be huge but to call it a $160 billion market seems like a form of hype that can lead to all kinds of issues. It’s almost reminiscent of the dot-com bubble.

And look what happened there.

Discuss

Collecta, a new search engine, launched today with a unique twist… they’re one of the first real-time search engines.

Searching with Collecta, you get real-time results from blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, social sites and various news outlets.

Collecta’s homepage gives the following description of the new search engine…

"Collecta is not like other search engines.
The web is alive with real-time information. So why search a stale archive? Collecta monitors the update streams of popular realtime blogs and sites like Twitter, Wordpress, and Flickr, so we can show you results as they happen. Give it a try."

What do you think of Collecta’s real-time search? Tell us.

Collecta’s UI is very simplistic and easy on the eye. No frills, just search. Upon doing a search, your term shows on the left (with options), results appear in the middle and selected/highlighted content appears on the right. (click the image below for full size view)

With each search users have to option to include/exclude certain search parameters such as Stories (blog posts, articles), Comments (on blog posts), Updates (Twitter, Jaiku, Identica), and Photos (Flickr). Collecta even has an option to pause a search stream (not really sure why).

Under the hood Collecta uses the XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) technology, which keeps tabs on information as it happens.

Collecta, so far, has had a very so-so launch day. The search engine was down for quite some time, leaving the company having to explain themselves via Twitter to potential searchers.

I guess they could argue that the demand for real-time search was so great their servers couldn’t handle the traffic.

It’s no secret that search is evolving, and real-time search is the future. Google’s own Larry Page has even said, "I have always thought we needed to index the web every second to allow real-time search".

Twitter, for example, already employs real-time search… and it works wonderfully. I often find myself using Twitter’s search over Google, just for the real-time aspect.

So, with the launch of Collecta… when do some of the major players jump on the real-time bandwagon? Let us know what you think.

Everybody’s talking about Bing today since the Microsoft’s new search engine became unexpectedly available on a widescale. That includes Google, and more specifically Matt Cutts.

An interesting conversation took place on Twitter today between Cutts and Betsy of the Bing account. Cutts was apparnently doing a little ego searching on Bing and does not appear entirely impressed with the results. SEO Services Group has transcribed the conversation:

Matt Cutts: Congrats to @bing on the launch! Sad to see this not-so-relevant result at #4 for [matt cutts] though: http://bit.ly/4a8Q1Y

Bing: @mattcutts anytime you want to give feedback to @bing, we’re here. I’m sitting with the devs at present. ^betsy

Bing: @mattcutts I know you are disappointed in ego search stuff tonight w/ @bing, but try ‘mtv movie awards 2009′ and see what you get. ^ba

Matt Cutts: Ouch. The #5 Bing result for [matt cutts] is spammy too: http://bit.ly/B2r5F It’s a YouTube->WordPress autogenerated blog.

Matt Cutts: @bing okay. First web result was from 2008 instead of 2009, even with 2009 in query: http://bit.ly/SToK1 . Google nails it.

Matt Cutts: @bing but doesn’t it bother you that [mtv movie awards] on Google gives great news results and 2009 url, but w/Bing I only see 2008, 2007, ?

Bing: @mattcutts Uh – the first answer folks see is the news answer, not what you circled. Apparently twilight won. ^ba

Matt Cutts: @bing by the way, Twilight did rock. I’m not ashamed to say it–glittery vampires rule!!

That’s about it for the conversation between the two (so far), but Cutts referenced that number 4 result again later:

To me, this just looks like Cutts stepping up to market Google in the wake of Bing’s launch. Bing’s getting a lot of attention right now, and it only makes sense that Google would want to make sure they don’t go thinking its better than their own search engine. It’s about protecting the brand.

Whether this is Matt’s intention or not, Cutts pointing out shortcomings in Bing’s search results is going to resonate throughout the industry. He is practically the posterboy for Google, at least among the search and tech savvy crowd.  A lot of people follow Matt Cutts. A lot of people hang nearly everything on what he has to say (search-wise).

Cutts has shed some light on some issues with Bing though. It’s a little early to burn the search engine at the stake. After all, it’s not even supposed to be launched yet, but after trying an ego search for myself (not something I performed in my first Bing runthrough), I am also much happier with Google’s results.

What are your thoughts on Bing? How do you like the search engine’s results compared to Google’s? Share your thoughts.

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