In reading this article about splogs, I noted the following paragraph:
For that to happen, though, the companies must identify the splogs they want to weed out – a harder task than it may seem. Take Some Title, the splog that mentioned me. Any human reader can tell instantly, as I did, that the site is tripe. But even if hosting services and search engines hired armies of people, the blogosphere is simply too big to sift through blogs one by one. Computers are faster but notoriously unable to distinguish sense from nonsense – they can’t tell Some Title from Shakespeare.
Why couldn’t Blogger or Six Apart or a firm like Technorati add all of the new blogs they register to a queue to be examined using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service? I’d love to see someone at least do an experiment in this vein. The only catch is that you’d want to have each blog checked more than once to prevent spiteful reviewers from disqualifying blogs that they didn’t agree with.
September 6, 2006 at 4:14 pm
You’d also need to check multiple times so that a human won’t write three posts to be “good” then splog it out.