Campaign for Real Metadata

An article in The Register shows an interesting trend. It seems that almost any "automatic" technology is susceptible to spam. The problem is that the ease of creation is too easy! Google thought they had sidestepped this by using network theory to automatically gauge the "relevance" of a web page. But the spammers seem to be catching up and Google are resorting to "electronic counter measures" to filter out the spam.

I think that getting real, good quality metadata will be a key requirement for the continued development of the Internet and Web 2.0 in particular. The obvious place to capture it is at the point of creation, but other challenges remain - how to maintain integrity and how to stop creators lying? Maintaining integrity is a technical tractable problem. Stopping people lying? That's harder and probably requires a new generation of social networking.

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