Like this wasn’t destined to happen, finally Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has announced some new changes that will lock down some of the capabilities for anonymous users.

Thus, to avoid future problems, Wales plans to bar anonymous users from creating new articles; only registered members will be able to do so. That change will go into effect Monday, he said, adding that anonymous users will still be able to edit existing entries.

These changes were a reaction to two recent issues with the system and piggyback on Wikipedia issues cited last month and general policies and procedures Wales said they were looking into back in August.

Wikipedia has gotten a lot of (mostly negative) press this last week due to Adam Curry anonymously making edits to the history of podcasting and an op-ed piece in USA Today pointing out that a bogus Wikipedia article suggested that a former assistant of Robert Kennedy may have been involved in two assasinations.

I think eventually more changes will be required to keep “anyone” from being able to alter the Wikipedia articles. And the more changes that reduce the ability for anyone to be able to change/edit material will make the project less about anyone and more about certain people. And the more limiting that is done, the more bias that could seap into the material.

The problem isn’t that there is a growing group of volunteers to correct errors and ban malicious users, the problem is that these people are, in fact, volunteers. What is Wales and company going to do if the volunteers don’t weed out stuff like the USA Today article pointed out?

More policy changes. Tighter restrictions. This road seems to be leading to a future with an encyclopedia that is created by only specific volunteers in the world instead of professional librarians and historians. Put me in the crowd that is not convinced that this road is worth travelling.

I don’t use Wikipedia that often. Do you? I always thought the site and idea had an underlying flaw, not to mention being backed by a completely unfriendly user interface but I still believe the concept and spirit are cool. In theory anyway. In practical, real world use? Sure taking a lot of bullets, isn’t it?

The reality is one can only go so far with managing and operating anything with a team of volunteers, especially online. I’m not down on volunteers in general for many, many things in this world, but a system of the entire world being a Borg-like collective of online volunteer librarians might just be an unrealistic goal in an age where spammers, trolls and miscreants flourish and could be editing out history. Not to mention people who were actually a part of history editing their own involvement, as Curry had tried to do. Yes, the system caught him. And yes he was flogged in the public square for his admitted misdeeds, but the media and bloggers aren’t going to pick up on every case of Wikimisdeedia.

And as for running a wiki without a community of volunteers or paid help to monitor it? Expect that thing to be spam bait faster than you can find the definition of wiki. My opinion remains unchanged: Wikis more often than not suck.

I still like the Wikipedia concept and wish Wales the best of luck, but I really am doubting this thing can take too many more credibility hits before the volunteers become the volunteered.

Then down comes the house.

Over at my Wordpress.com demo blog this morning I noticed in the admin area that Akismet believed it caught my first comment spam:

Unfortunately for Akismet, it turns out it was not spam. How ironic that the very first comment Akismet nabs is a false positive. It was a link from the IRC logs from one of our web radio shows. On a positive note, however, Matt and his team included the ability to mark it as “not spam.” There is also another tab along the top “Manage” subcategory of the admin area marked “Akismet Spam (x)”:

Akismet has their own Zeitgeist running which tells you the stats (real time or cached, Matt?). As of this writing Akismet has caught 493,411 spams, 4,707 so far today and reports that 81% of all comments are spam. It doesn’t report the false positive numbers which would be another interesting stat to add. Maybe they will add that in the future.

For those curious about Wordpress.com, it is now available for anybody to setup an account to check out.

Recently AOL decided to add two bots to AIM — Moviefone and ShoppingBuddy — irritating some users. AOL’s attitude seems to be that they can easily be deleted, but some netizens viewed this as intrusion.

EveryTomorrow describes a humorous exchange with the bots.
Joshua Stilwell writes: “AOL claims that the feedback on the bots have been mixed… I can just imagine 90% say its stupid, 8% say its not a bad idea, and 2% like it… I think AOL would call that mixed…” ilia Alshanetsky wonders what’s next?

I didn’t see even one person the past few days say they actually appreciated or liked these two bots being auto-added, but I’m sure there is some AIM fans out there who were digging the convenience.

Somebody please buy AOL and fire whoever is making stupid moves like this over there.

If there is a hell after life on earth, then I fully expect software that does some/all of this stuff deserving of being running on computers there 24/7:

- monitoring activity without express user permission, knowledge and consent (spyware)
- reporting activity to a third party without permission and full disclosure of information being shared
- too much memory consumption
- loading at startup in systray without user permission during install and each run
- bundling other software as part of default installation
- no uninstallation program provided or uninstall program that doesn’t completely clean up trace of software (including registry entries)
- phoning home without explicit user permission. This includes backdoor installs and upgrades
- inadequate help/documentation
- using too much screen real estate, wasted space
- crippled trialware. Either go all the way or not at all
- hiding deceptive activity inside a long-winded EULA

Feel free to add to the list in the comments or via trackback from your blog.

Before anybody gets too excited about this one. The wordpress.com service is still in beta, invite-only status and it’s possible that they plan to setup custom error pages before they launch to the general public. They are not doing 404 redirects, but some Scoble readers are noticing and commenting on unexplained redirects.

Here’s another thing I dislike about using third party blog hosting, even paid hosting sometimes if you don’t monitor their activity closely. They take liberties with webmaster/blogger’s traffic. Recently I signed up with a well known, heavily advertised host which for this post will remain nameless but I’ll be talking about in a separate post. When I signed up for one of their popular shared hosting plans I added three domains. One of the first things I noticed was their automated signup program put up a default advertising page on all the domains for themselves. They have an affiliate program, but none of those links were affiliate links for the customer (me). So basically, I paid them for hosting, they setup a placeholder advertising page for themselves that would stay there until it was replaced by content, and then anybody who might have signed up through those pages I received zero credit.

Bullshit.

Now take Robert Scoble who recently switched his primary blog to the upcoming wordpress.com commercial blog hosting service. Instead of being able to have his own domain, he went to (was forced to?) a subdomain (scoblelizer.wordpress.com) and I’ve noticed a couple times when I navigated there being redirected to Wordpress.com. A little while later the site was going to Scoble’s blog again. No error message or explanation, just a redirect. I was going to drop Scoble an email about the situation and alert him that his traffic was being redirected, probably without his knowledge, but I didn’t get to it.

Turns out that I wasn’t the only one who has noticed this, via the Channel 9 forums:

I was having problems recently when I tried to access his blog. It was just redirecting me to wordpress.com.

If this is how it will work once wordpress.com launches to the general public, then let me call BS on it now. A redirect to the wordpress.com homepage sending off Scoble’s readers without giving any other explanation will be yet another black eye for Wordpress. Don’t do it, folks!

Being wordpress.com is in beta status, it’s quite possible this is all an honest mistake, as Matt claimed when they were caught with the -9000 hidden pixel trick, it certainly is another really bad choice of redirection, especially with a blogger as prominent as Scoble. And trust me, it is a choice .. somebody setup the server to redirect errors to the home page. That didn’t happen accidentally. If that somebody was Scoble, then he might want to let his readers know this is the default behavior for error messages, but I doubt seriously he did it or even knows that this is happening. No, I didn’t ask him but now that it’s on Channel 9, I’m sure he will quickly become aware of the situation.

Unfortunately, this is a common 3rd party hosting trick: hey, here’s an idea, we redirect certain server/script error conditions and when there are server/script problems instead of throwing a customer default error page, send everybody to the home page (free advertising!).

Unless the customer agrees to this activity in advance this is WRONG. Bad. I don’t care if it’s “free hosting” if it happens without the customer/blogger’s knowledge it’s deceptive and wrong. The host is taking advantage of the webmaster/blogger’s traffic.

Scoble, I’ll make the plea to you again: get your own domain and stop hosting off other people. You can setup Wordpress on your own domain and not be part of stuff like this. My offer to help you get YOUR OWN hosting from somebody reputable is still available. Probably won’t cost you a dime either. I’d be happy to help you. For nothing. No strings attached.

(Note: I offered to help Scoble find hosting once before and though he called me back, he decided to go with another option.)

At the very least please consider telling wordpress.com to simply display an error message on your page rather than redirect your readers to their homepage for any reason. Some of your readers might think you are deceptively pimping wordpress. Maybe that’s ok with you, I don’t know, but your readers might want to be informed, if that’s the case.

I really didn’t want to blog about this in more detail because I don’t like splogs and any detailed post by me shooting down ideas against them makes me sound somewhat like a splogapologist. Unfortunately, Mitch Ratcliffe really seems to be sticking by his guns that encouraging people to click on Adsense ads in splogs that they have no interest in is not, in fact, click fraud:

Here’s the thing, most of the comments about this did not read my follow-up posting about information pollution. I’m not suggesting fraud. I am suggesting political action. If we don’t make some noise about this and create significant discussion about what constitutes legitimate contributions to the information economy, we’re surrendering our role in defining the Net. At no point do I suggest click fraud, what I suggested is that when bloggers receive spam postings they go to the sources of those sites and click the ads there.

Mitch also calls this “political action” in his recent comments left on this blog:

TDavid—I think you’re wrong, it is not dishonesty to follow links on a site to discover what advertisers are supporting sploggers and send them, along with Google, a message by driving conversion rates down. That’s a political action.

First of all, you can see the target URL of the sponsor in the Adsense ad and therefore can type that into any browser window. You can then petition that sponsor via email or other electronic means without ever clicking a single Adsense ad. It is not a requirement to click the ad to “discover what advertisers are supporting sploggers.”

Secondly, sorry Mitch, dressing this dog idea up as “political action” is being political, not taking any sort of honorable, ethical action as a responsible business owner. You say this is not a business decision, but that’s wrong. The problem here are innocent bystanders (the advertisers) are being wronged financially. Advertisers are not signing up with Adwords to advertise on splogs and even if some small percentage of them are, is it really our place to try and disrupt their business model under the guise of it being for the greater good? Robin Hoodism doesn’t apply here.

If you have no interest or intention of possibly buying from those ads, you are defrauding the advertisers because they paid for legitimately interested eyeballs from somewhere. They buy into the concept that their ads will show up where it is contextually relevant and are expecting to receive interested eyeballs. People who are encouraged to click ads just for the sake of sending some message about splogs, even if it is targeted clicks on splogs only are still committing click fraud.

It is sort of like some of these people who Adsense (rightly) booted out of their program saying: “yeah, but I only clicked my ads a couple times.” If they click any of their own ads and therefore profit from that action even one time, one penny, that is still click fraud and a violation of Adsense TOS. There is no couple times and that’s ok rule. No gray area, no political action, it’s click fraud.

Click fraud. Click fraud. Click fraud.

There are other better ways of dealing with this splog problem and some folks are already out there hard at work on them. I look forward to the upcoming Seattle Mind where we can talk about these ideas in more depth and create some real world action plans to reduce the splog infestation.

And you should do some more research (read the Adsense Terms of Service and Program Policies carefully). Google does not have to prove you committed click fraud to eject you from their program. They can kick you out for just thinking you committed click fraud based on their own data, which likely they won’t show anybody unless forced by a court of law. Sure, you could sue them and subpoena their evidence which will most assuredly confuse any court of law when they actually try and sift through Google’s evidence of alleged wrongdoing. They have billions in the bank and none of us should forget those billions will buy plenty of court time with highly skilled and very expensive attorneys.

Frankly, Mitch, the fact that you have already made this click fraud idea a public spectacle is enough evidence for them to cancel your Adsense account now. You are encouraging something that their program policy specifically prohibits. You are breaking their TOS.

Most affiliate programs have the deck stacked way against the affiliate so the best we can do as affiliates — always — is to tell others only when asked, not promote, only clicking ads people are interested in and never promoting or encouraging people to click Adsense ads they aren’t legitimately interested in. That is the business deal we signed into when we signed up for their program. If we don’t like those terms, we walk, we don’t use our blog for political action to try and void those terms. We just cancel the program and use somebody else. There are plenty of affiliate programs out there, so if you don’t like Google’s program then don’t use it.

I happen to like Google’s Adsense program and do use it. I try my best to comply with their program policies and TOS and hope that we will continue to have a business relationship into the future. Is their program perfect? No. Is their program being abused by sploggers? Yes. Do I think they can be motivated to fix it? Yes, but not by conducting click fraud.

Those even remotely considering Mitch’s idea please realize that it is against Adsense program policies to encourage people to click ads for any reason. Here is the specific passage:

Web pages may not include incentives of any kind for users to click on ads. This includes encouraging users to click on the ads or to visit the advertisers’ sites as well as drawing any undue attention to the ads. For example, your site cannot contain phrases such as “click here,” “support us,” “visit these links,” or other similar language that could apply to any ad, regardless of content. In addition, publishers may not bring unnatural attention to sites displaying ads through unsolicited mass emails or unwanted advertisements on third-party websites. These activities are strictly prohibited in order to avoid potential inflation of advertiser costs.

And now check item #5 on the Adsense TOS (additional bolding mine):

Prohibited Uses. You shall not, and shall not authorize or encourage any third party to: (i) directly or indirectly generate queries, impressions of or clicks on any Search Results, Links and/or Ad(s) through any automated, deceptive, fraudulent or other invalid means, including but not limited to through repeated manual clicks

And the only time to click these Adsense ads legitimately are:

1) if they aren’t your own Adsense code ads
2) you are legitimately interested in what the ad says
3) you haven’t been coerced to click the ad by some third party as some sort of incentive

Mitch’s example clearly violates #3. The incentive being that if people click Adsense ads, especially if they use “repeated manual clicks” then they will someday possibly, maybe, hopefully, politically reduce the splog problem. Sorry, Mitch, but this activity is completely and thoroughly wrong.

If 1-3 above aren’t correct then it can’t be excused as some political action or splog vengeance, it is quite simply and correctly click fraud.

There are better ways. Let’s explore, find and use them together to combat this problem. I believe that Google will help. I see from Mitch’s post that he is setting up a site called memepeace.org but honestly I can’t see joining a group like that if the foundation is based upon click fraud. That isn’t the kind of peace I know nor is it ethically viable. I sincerely hope that’s not the charter and there will be more to this organization and this click fraud idea was merely the spark to ignite a reasonable, honorable, ethical call to action.

Unlike others who think Google’s billions have darkened their soul, I believe at the end of the day they still want to do the right thing. Sure, I don’t like everything they do and complain here loudly when they do something I think is ill-advised.

You’ll know when I feel otherwise: when I stop using their products and services and sell their stock. That is the ultimate message that doesn’t require any click fraud to execute.

The splog problem requires strong action, but please let’s not lose our ethics, honor and minds in the solution. I can’t — and won’t — get or stay aboard that train.

Eweek’s Larry Seltzer points out that Symantec has continually raised prices of their Norton Antivirus updates over the year where he asks if only suckers renew?

In 2001 Symantec increased the price from $3.95 to $9.95, quite a large increase on its own. Just recently, coincident with the release of the 2006 versions of their security line of products, Symantec once again increased the price of the subscription renewal to $29.99. The new 2006 version of Norton Antivirus, of course including an annual subscription itself, costs $39.99. Symantec’s message is clear: you’re a sucker if you don’t upgrade the program. The only question is whether you’re a sucker for getting the new version too.

Wonder if the expenses to keep all the spam and scam away have made it really necessary for Symantec to keep increasing their prices or if this is more about increasing the bottom line? Neither of those realities, if true, are encouraging.

For those who may want to jump off the Symantec renewal price increase train, there are other, less expensive, alternative like AVG. Comcast Cable internet subscribers get for free — at least we did, anyway — McAffee Virus scan.

Bottom line is that we shouldn’t just renew services blindly; compare, shop around, see what others are using, etc. I did the math on my .Mac subscription recently and decided that $108+ USD per year was too much for what it offered considering my limited amount of use. Vote with your feet.

Some polish is beginning to rub off the Wikipedia’s blinding sheen.

Wikipedia co-founder, Jimmy Wales, who I read somebody suggest (I didn’t keep the link, sorry) should be given the Nobel Peace Prize for his work seems now to be admitting the open season process of wikis has turned out some real “crap.”

Surprisingly, Wales agreed that the entries weren’t up to snuff. “The two examples he puts forward are, quite frankly, a horrific embarassment. [sic] Bill Gates and Jane Fonda are nearly unreadable crap. Why? What can we do about it?” he asked.

I’m not surprised the Gates entry would be vandalized, poorly editorialized and/or some combination of both. The richest man in America certainly has his share of coarse critics and envious trolls. As for Fonda? Another public figure prime rewrite target in the wiki space.

This response seems a bit prophetic of Larry Singer’s detailed, excellent description of what he feels is wrong with Wikipedia when he exited the project in December 2004:

… the crying need to get more experts on board and a publicly credible review process in place (so that there is a subset of “approved” articles–not a heavy-handed, complicated process, of course). The only way Wikipedia can achieve these things is to jettison its anti-elitism and to moderate its openness to trolls and fools; but it will almost certainly not do these things.

Unfortunately, IMO, the biggest achille’s heel of the Wikipedia — which is also credited by many as its biggest strength — remains the system that powers it and also empowers almost a scary amount of user freedom: wikis. At least scary to webmasters who have been around awhile and have witnessed firsthand what happens when something is too open to the net at large.

Can you say vandalism?

Bottom line, what I wrote almost three months ago on wikis has only been further reinforced by Wales comments in Orlowski’s article. I wrote:

Put me in the group who doesn’t have faith in the wiki model (sorry, wiki fans). Yeah, the Wikipedia is cool and a few other wikis that are well policed but the vast majority of them end up vandalized. Sad, but true.

I wish Wales and the project the best of luck in getting Wikipedia to the next level where the realization than a truly open system, must still have a few, necessary closed doors to stop chaos from reigning.

Guess this anti-spam Sunday continues (I’ll try to make this the last one on spam for a little while) …

The FBI is putting the crackdown on alleged spammer, Alan Ralsky, who says he isn’t a spammer, but a “commercial e-mailer.” I’m sure at least one of our email boxes has been hit by his commercial email storm.

Detroit news:

Warrants unsealed last week revealed that agents in September seized computers, laptops, financial records and disks from the 8,000-square-foot home of Alan M. Ralsky. The $750,000 West Bloomfield mini-mansion was built off profits from the 100 million electronic offers for everything from Botox to mortgages that Ralsky sends every day.

The article points to his 2002 undisclosed cash settlement with Verizon over two situations where Ralsky allegedly crippled their network.

I believe in innocent until proven guilty, so let Ralsky get his day in court, but I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t see jail time. He’s familiar with jail, as he got put there once before (not for spam, though).

If guilty should turn out to be the verdict in this case then I wonder if Ralsky’s stuff will be auctioned off like AOL did with their spam king catch? They should sell it and give it to the people who were displaced by Katrina.

Nathan Weinberg over at InsideGoogle is wondering if WeblogsInc is gaming Technorati, Blogpulse and others by using their automated weekly Best Of script to pound out their network wide automated messages:

This is something all the blog search engines need to work around, or that Weblogs needs to stop doing until they do. It is wrong to congratulate yourself on having your blogs in high positions on link-based lists when many of those links are self generated. Its that gray area between link spam and editorial linking that this falls into, and I’d like to think the folks at Weblogs Inc are honest enough to clean this up. We’ll see.

I think this is more a problem of programming than anything dishonest or unethical. WIN should have their program only post to their active blogs and it might be better to post relevant or semi-relevant content Best Of posts. This presents some technical challenges, however if every post was tagged (and it seems to me they all are) then it would be possible to only post the Best Of relevant posts to their respective network blogs or the more dead ones. That would actually be a more valuable service to readers, too.

Now take a look at the WIN Spam Blog: spam.weblogsc.inc. It’s so bad I’m not even going to link to it. Sorry, readers will have to copy/paste if they are that curious. Jason/Brian, now that you guys are AOL flush, maybe you should pay a few folks to aggregate spam-related blog news into that abortion, find some key writers, or shut it down. In WIN’s defense, they are actively, eagerly searching for writers. This smells like a good potential opportunity.

CNET was so enthralled by this blog that they made it one of their top 100 tech blogs on the web. Too bad CNET hadn’t seen the Hmm spam category.

Jason, how much will you pay me to write about the Best Of the Best Of WIN auto posted blog entries?

I didn’t discover this CNET mistake, BTW, it was pointed out by one of the wise CNET readers. This is a great example of why I like comments and don’t feel that all commenters should be treated like second class citizens. The comments on the CNET top 100 list are much more interesting than WIN’s spam blog and many of those posts are people themselves pitching their own blogs. InsideGoogle isn’t on the list either, BTW.

It also makes the folks at CNET putting this on the list suspect. Like how did this WIN spam blog get there? I have a guess why: they needed to have a category that covered the spam problem and nobody inhouse followed any blogs about the spam problem so they went to the popular network, WIN, and assumed that theirs just had to be one of the best. I mean, really, these are the same folks behind Engadget. Of course publishers are not immune from dogs. Not me, not WIN, not even Stephen King (Maximum Overdrive, anyone?)

That’s the only logical reason I can see for the WIN Spam Blog being in their list. Only the CNET editors who compiled the list will ever know the truth, but I hope the next version removes that in favor of other, better choices, or by that time WIN hires some writers on this subject to raise that from the dead.

I digress.

Again, I don’t think WIN is doing anything unethical or intentionally deceptive by running our their Best Of automated script posting across the network. They are just cross marketing their properties across their network. It should be Technorati, Blogpulse, etc that filter out these weekly Best Of posts and I see that Dave Sifry is already commenting in the InsideGoogle thread and appreciated the head’s up.

It didn’t take long for me to filter out these posts on my own server-based aggregator. Like one line of code, actually.

Update 2:10 PST: Jason Calacanis “just got off a plane” and stops by InsideGoogle in the comments section to set the record straight:

… It is not to game the system it is to promote our blogs. I think it is fair to say that a) people know this, b) search eng. Know it, and c) it is not a big deal. If it was automated that would be kinda wrong I agree.

Actually, I think if it isn’t at least partially automated it would be “kinda wrong.” Who wants to manually copy the same post to 50+ blogs each week? Yeah, the post text might be assembled by a human each week but I find it hard to believe that a human being is going on a copy/pasting mission once a week.

I’ve struckthru any mention of automated posting above, since Jason says it is being done by a human and I have no proof otherwise (even though it doesn’t make complete sense). Jason said he’s going to write up a post more fully explaining how this works later tonight.

Wonder if that will make next week’s Best Of list? Oh, the irony.