I’ve taken my photo gallery offline. It’s seeing constant comment spam attacks, and there appears to be no easy way to stop them. I’ll probably move the content elsewhere, either on a platform that allows disabling comments effectively, or move to the “cloud” via flickr or some such crappy site.

To give you an idea of the magnitude of this attack – the legitimate traffic on my gallery is between 10-20 hits a day – almost nothing. The comment spam bots hit it with 2000 hits a day. What’s worse, is that this loads the mysql server at media temple such that they’re requiring that I pay an additional $20/mo for a mysql “container” – some sort of extra virtual machine. I run a Captcha, and I’ve turned off access to comments. There must be some
hole in Gallery 2, as I’m still getting spam.

This is all because of spammers attempts to get page ranking on their scam sites by inserting links in comments on my gallery. The fact that Google is onto this gaming, and the comment spam has no effect doesn’t matter.

So, I’m annoyed at having to take time out of my day to address this, and ultimately lose the ability for independent participation on the Internet via my photo gallery. The Internet as an open, independent, non-commercial medium is at risk without regulation and enforcement to stop these chilling effects. Without regulation, all the internet will be is Google, flicker, Facebook, and MSN, soon to be mega-merged into a single AOL-like “service” .

At times working groups can use e-mail in a way that seems to exploit all its weaknesses. Here’s some problem areas that seem to crop up.

Tone
The tone of an e-mail can be somewhat harsh, cold, and even accusatory. Getting across the emotion in written correspondence requires some skill and effort, and often we lack the time and inclination to give tone proper care. This can lead to e-mail threads full of defensive posturing and tangential commentary. It’s best to interpret e-mail literally, and ignore tone, since it’s often misleading. If someone asks, “Have you reviewed my report yet?” don’t imagine they’re saying you’re lazy, just assume they want to know. If you’re concerned about sub-text, switch to another better suited medium to address it; in-person conversations or phone calls, if working remotely. It’s difficult to build positive, comfortable working relationships over e-mail. Keeping touch in a casual way via IM can bridge the gap.

Transience
E-Mail can be a great way to hash issues out. The problem is that an e-mail thread is a poor record of any conclusions that might have been reached, or agreements that have been arrived at. E-mail archives are hard to manage and search, and the thread can be subject to interpretation dependant on out-of-channel communications . Worse still, progress can be lost on the issues, and thrash can take hold for days or weeks, only ended via fatigue and frustration.

Wiki’s are a much better tool for hammering out issues. Discussion can happen in comments, changes can be tracked, and the resulting artifact should be well organized and searchable.

Format
For complex discussion, e-mail in practice has some difficult formatting issues, mostly around quoting and commenting within the thread. This is due to different tools and users behavior when quoting earlier messages. Some folks top-post, others bottom-post, or mix the two. Some messages are plain text, others are html, and attachments of various formats maybe used. The solution to this problem is to agree on some standards on quoting and format. If simple standards become difficult, it’s a sure sign some other medium should be used, or the discussion is too broad to make progress on.

My recommendations are:
- Minimal quoting (don’t quote unless it’s really necessary)
- Bottom-posting (comment after the quote)
- plain-text only.
- Use URLs to reference material on a web server instead of attachments where possible.

The problem with social media is that in it’s current, most popular form, it’s constructed at cross purposes to getting work done. If social networking is to support work groups engaged in productive work, it needs to have the following characteristics: Coherence Transparency, Telepresence, Authentication, and Attribution.

Facebook emphasizes growing your friend network. For most people, anyone you know is your friend, and their prestige is based on the total number of friends. This causes a lot of diffusion and noise, as the list of friends gets populated by many people you have little in common with, much less any shared goals for getting something done. Facebook also has groups and networks, but again, these things are based on growth, mainly because Facebooks’ business model depends on growing the user community, not on building groups of people who accomplish any particular goal or task. What’s needed is Coherence – formation of association around common goals or purposes.

In it’s current form, social networking is interesting because of its extensions to on-line life, making it much easier to find people and keep track of what their up to. The opportunity presented is for Transparency. This makes it fun, but a huge waste of time. Some sort of project system, where people could agree on a set of goals and end-results of an effort, and filter the noise outside of that, is were social media has to go.

It’s missing a couple of other ingredients: Authentication and Attribution. It’s hard to say who people really are on Facebook, and what their real accomplishments are. Similarly, Linked-In offers networking in a business-oriented way, and has some basic “reputation” features via its peer recommendation system, but it’s pretty hard to verify what people say they’ve accomplished.

Authentication is more than just keeping the bad guys out – it really needs to be there so that you can be sure people are who they appear to be. In real life, we have finely evolved skills for recognizing faces and voices – there needs to be an online equivalent.

Similarly, attribution must be linked to authentication so that we all know who has done what. Reputation systems are a bit different, telling you what others think about an indivitual – attribution is more about allowing you to make your own judgements. An attribution system would like like a cross-discipline version of IMDB, where you could find out what someone has worked on, and in what capacity.

Beyond attribution and authentication there are merit systems which provide a ranking or shorthand of how accomplishments compare to the group. Think of boy scout merit badges – a summarisation of various relevant accomplishments.

After struggling with lack of structure in my own work, and reading Time Management for Anarchists, it seems to me that project-based social media could serve the purpose of providing the structure that we used to rely on the corporate office for.

With authentication and attribution providing the foundation for reputation and merit systems, we could understand how we might work and contribute across multiple projects and programs, and causes.

I frequent various on-line forums to follow my interests, and much of the interaction is participation in forum or discussion software. One example is Seasoned Gamers, and community founded by a group of adults that played Halo 2 on XBox Live. Seasoned Gamers has since taken on a life of its own, beyond Live, Halo, and even beyond gaming. Due to its origins via Live, member’s identities use a gamer tag, which is required to be unique across all of XBox Live.

My Live gamer tag is gregnnn, a minor variation of my real name. Most folks use gamer tags that are completely different from their real name. I’ve interacted with this group for a bit more than three years now, and I identify members by gamer tag. Both Season Gamers’ forums and Live use avatars – small-ish icons or pictures to visually identify individuals.

There are a couple of problems with the use of gamer tags and avatars as on-line identity. The biggest of these is that people change them. People change avatars from time to time, and some folks even change their gamer tags. This can dilute or destroy identity, in the same way than changing your name and your appearance periodically in real life would make it hard for your friends to keep track of you. Given the global uniqueness requirement, many gamer tags are unpronouceable and hard to distiguish. This makes it hard for me to recognize some folks, and I often find myself mixing up identities.

The other problem is that this on-line identity is separate from your real identity. Maintaining some anonymity has it’s uses, particularly if you don’t want to suffer the consequences of your on-line persona’s actions in real life. But the downside is that you’ve diluted your presence and subjected everyone to a mapping problem between your identities. I wouldn’t depend on the use of an on-line persona as means of protecting your personal privacy, or insulation from you behaviour on-line. Most people do not have the knowledge, skills and discipline to stay completely untraceable on-line.

So, I’ve come to some conclusions about on-line identity and its uses:

Pick One
Don’t dilute yourself across multiple identities. I’d go with your real name unless privacy is really important to you. Whatever you pick, use it everywhere, that is, one user name, one e-mail address. Mine is: Greg Nichols/gregnnn/greg@atomicspatula.com. If I could own nichols.com I’d buy it in a second. Note: Atomic Spatula isn’t me, it’s a place.

Make it Good
It’s fun to see people who start out with Live gamer tags come to grips with their mistake, realizing that ” xXx LeetSniper xXx” isn’t going to play well for a 30 year-old adult on a forum about gardening. If it’s not your real name, pick something that you’re comfortable with everyone using everywhere. As for avatars, I’d go with a reasonable headshot. I like Seth Godin’s recommendations on this, though I’d say there’s a lot more at stake than your “personal brand”. Us humans have invested millions of years of evolution into facial recognition. It would be silly not to use it. I use my real name where possible, and I really need a better head-shot avatar that I’ve got right now.

Don’t Change It.
Changing names or avatars is something you should do very rarely. It’s akin to plastic surgery or name changes in real life, and not something you’d do on a whim.

Finally, I’d consider what the goals are in maintaining an on-line identity. You’d like it to be the foundation of personal recognition that you build a reputation on, whether it’s for professional purposes or purely social interactions.

Black Rain from Semiconductor on Vimeo.

Whoa!

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