Who is the spammer in web 2.0 ? The newbie !

When you receive an unsolicited or undesired message on your electronic mail box, that’s a spam. That’s quite clear because the mail box is personal and you know exactly what you asked for. But what about the recent web 2.0 applications, forums and social networking websites ? These apps are opened to a wide audience.

Spam in web 2.0 has a completely different aspect. When you’re a newbie user on a web 2.0 service, you’re automatically considered as a spammer. You can easily test that. Just register to digg and post a message linking to your website for instance. This will be automatically considered as a spam even if you’re website is really interesting and you’re in the correct category. It is a spam not matter how interesting is your website.

Another great example I like is Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, it is impossible to add an “external link” to an article if you’re a newbie. Even if your link is really interesting and extends in a smart way the information to the Wikipedia article. If you do that you’re a spammer. In fact you’re judged first on your registration date and your contribution to the community (or lack of contribution).

That means that even if you are a 50 years experienced historian and register to Wikipedia to add an interesting link (that may be your own) to an article about world war 2, you are a newbie and some active member will erase your link (without even reading it probably) and treat you as if you were a 5 year old boy.

In fact web 2.0 has pushed the feeling of community a step further. The success of web 2.0 in the US is directly linked to the high feeling of community of the American people. In the US you very often belong to a “society” that share common interests.

In web 2.0, the criteria have changed but the communities are still there, most of the time invisible. So the only way to be recognized and approved by the community - and thus not to be considered as a spammer - is to share the common interests, contribute, participate and show that you like them.

I’m not saying new things here as these web apps are usually referred to as “social networking services”. Before these Internet was considered as a chaos. Except search engines there are not so many ways to bring a certain sense of order to the Internet. One of the best way is communities.

Thus in the the Web 2.0 world, spammers are newbies that haven’t been integrated in the community.