Most of the really good spammers create One-Off and Two-Off accounts. That is, they build huge lists with their spam tactics – and use those lists in spammy ways – while at the same time, they keep their ‘real’ blogs and websites strictly White Hat SEO.

Twitter Spam, and Social Spam in general, has appeal because it works.

Experience shows that people will accept friend requests and join online groups with (alarmingly) little thought – but they hesitate to enter their email to subscribe to a newsletter.

Web 2.0 has also changed the nature of search engine spam: SEO Spam now utilizes all of the Social Media sites to gain top rankings quickly, not just Twitter.

The noise IS increasing
Top rankings in Google are often taken up by bloggers, forums, videos and PDF’s that were created by hobby authors who are not qualified experts – or the top rankings are full of 25 flashy animated affiliate sites.

Free Content is Often Chaff
Just like HBO vs Free Television — The ad-supported free content that ranks highly in Google is actually making it worthwhile to pay a small fee for good content that is free of ads.

Spam is going to keep increasing. Get better filters and pay no heed to it.

Quality content speaks for itself.

Cheers

Doug

When I used to “just” blog, I could get 5-10 comments on the blog post. Now I write a blog post then alert people (manually, with value added) via twitter. Problem is that then don’t get any comments, instead the conversation has moved onto twitter.

Now of course conversations on twitter have significant value but they can only be accessed by those on twitter at the time – they are not very good as a public record of what was discussed . The 90% of people on the blog who are not on twitter miss the comments.

So got two strategies I am going to try now
1) Write a blog post – but only alert people to it at some stage later. People can do their own aggregation via RSS rather than assume I will mention interesting posts via my Twitter feed. Hopefully this will move comments back to the blog (or some comments back to the blog, at least. If people want to only engage via twitter I don’t want to turn those people away)

2) Copying and pasting twitter conversation into a blog comment.
e.g.
http://www.tourcms.com/blog/2009/02/06/journalists-solving-the-too-much-travel-information-challenge/

However with this 2nd approach, not sure if Twitter users will be happy with this (as it was posted without permission) and secondly, it is a mess.

Certainly not planning an automated connection between Twitter and a blog post. Far too scary!

What would you do in my situation?

Interesting post. I would tend to focus on your last point that the twitter comments could add useful insights if used correctly.

Interestingly, I polled people via Twitter yesterday to see if they minded the trackbacks (which are separated from the comments) and you were the only person who said they didn’t like them. Of course, that doesn’t make you wrong – you’ve made me pause and re-consider whether the plugin is useful or not.

Right now I’m personally treating this as an experiment, which I’ll continue for a while. I’m finding it very useful to see the trackbacks myself, as I had no idea that all these people were finding my site useful. Still, the site isn’t just about me, so I’ll revisit it in a little while.

One note: Chat Catcher does let you put the twitter trackbacks/comments (you get to choose where they appear) into moderation, which is one option I’m considering.

Cheers,

Dave