I have written about spam in the past, and I must say, I was distressed when I read that the conversion rate of spam was 4%. C'mon people, we'll never get this to stop if spammers get that high a conversion.
This morning I was presenting Buzznet at a MediaCenter conference, replacing Caterina from Flickr (with a 12 hour notice). One of the themes I was presenting to publishers and media executives is how the platform Buzznet has built can help newspapers to provide a venue for citizens to post pictures of their local community. The poster child of that movement is the work Howard Owens has spearheaded for the Ventury County Star (see Susan and Dan's posts). I therefore did a quick demo of the site, showed my own photoblog, the Venture County Star's, and noticed something wrong with the gallery of one of the bands which is using Buzznet for fan-generated pictures: HIM.
A spammer had inundated the gallery with bitmaps of fake Rolex, that also showed on the Buzznet home page which displays latest uploads... Very un-cool for a demo.
I could only share with the audience the conclusion that Buzznet had gotten into the mainstream since spammers now started spending time bothering our users. This however means that the policy we have been using to let fans freely post to the site, using a self-regulation approach to remove inappropriate content, might have to be changed.
Thanks to Susan and Andrew for the opportunity to participate to this great media gathering. Great discussions and exchanges throughout the day.
A few pictures taken during the day:
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JD Lasica just published a full account of the topics covered during the conference.
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