I guess we should call this Keywords 2.0

Anyway, they have a whole taxonomy of ‘things’ laid out.  Check out “The Type Hierarchy” page.  A great start.

I guess this means that a lot of SEO people are gonna start getting work again. It’ll be interesting to me to see if people start actually putting this stuff into their CMSs.  I suspect not.  I suspect that the kinds of companies that have such rich data that they can just rebuild the hooks they use as their apps render HTML will already be benefitting enough in organic search that they wont find a need to actually clutter up their code with this stuff.  I mean I find it very unlikely that a site like Disney’s would get out-ranked by some spammer because the spammer used these newer HTML attributes.

Then again, the fact that the major players are on board with this makes me wonder if there isn’t a reason that’s profitable to search companies to finally start getting rid of all the garbage from SERPs.  Touch-screen finger fatigue?  Even so, it’s all the damn spammers in eastern Europe that’ll have the resources to recode everything, at least in the near future.

Above all, I’m glad to see any attempt at making information more granular.  And deep down, I still want the universal distributed database we were all so excited about back in web2.0  when the semantic web seemed like it was on the horizon, before facebook and the mobile app-o-sphere took over.

What do we call this current era?  The API-o-sphere?  The Walled-garden-o-sphere?  Maybe we should just call it Facebook.

Intrigued and disappointed at the same time.

The site links to sites who are also under attack and when the bug is running correctly on those sites, the sites redirect the hits to the final destination,

which is http://www.zml.com/

I don’t know if zml.com knows this is happening.  I mean I suppose it’s possible that some unscrupulous SEO or Marketing guy promised them traffic and then resorted to this to get it.  I’m contacting them now to inform them of this uncool practice being committed on their behalf, and if they are not willing to cooperate on putting an end to it, I will have no choice but to give them some negative attention.

The process of extracting the bad links from the content was long and hard since the strings of code inserted were very inconsistent.

The following is a list of the sites being linked thru, which I assume are all victims of this malware.  If you own one of these sites, feel free to drop me a line and I will point you in the right direction as far as putting an end to this.

• http://blog.segd.org
• http://www.investorsunited.com
• http://www.oca-gla.org
• http://www.thunderstruck.org
• http://subway.com
• http://verdadeabsoluta.net
• http://yourrnc.com
• http://wordpressthemesbox.com
• http://mp3db.org
• http://webconsultingdc.com
• http://turtlesurvival.org
• http://turtleconservationfund.org
• http://truenorthbrass.com
• http://tarabooks.com
• http://kolenalaila.com
• http://techbostonacademy.org
• http://pie-flex.com
• http://www.philebrity.tv
• http://www.landmarkwine.com
• http://artsinbushwick.org
• http://brettmartin.org
• http://bsf.org
• http://www.popandpolitics.com
• http://womanhonorthyself.com
• http://www.brainstorm9.com
• http://webdev.entheosweb.com
• http://www.topicus-healthcare.com
• http://www.vfilings.com
• http://constantinessword.com
• http://www.dopiska.com
• http://writingcenters.org
• http://www.radisson.com
• http://notjustaprettyface.org
• http://www.arizonacriminaldefenseblog.com
• http://www.sembrarpaz.com
• http://www.apostilla.com
• http://www.geektechs.net
• http://johnquiggin.com
• http://blog.pdma.org
• http://bluesheaven.com

Message to ZML:

Hello,

I am a developer and recently one of my clients who is running WordPress for her personal website was attacked by some Malware that inserted thousands of links throughout her content. Those links resolve to your site, but via redirects thru other sites that I assume are also victims of the malware.

You look like you’ve built a pretty nice site here. And I’m writing to give you the chance to get on board with fixing this problem before I am forced to create some negative attention in the blogosphere and social media.

It doesn’t seem like you would want to be resposible for malware. But it also doesn’t seem like anyone would go through the trouble to make all these links back to you unless you were paying them. Perhaps you hired some marketing or SEO people and were not aware that they would be using these tactics? Please write back soon as I have very little patience for this kind of thing.

Thanks,

Andrew A. Peterson

Some samples of weird code that the bot inserted:

<wp:tag><wp:tag_slug>%d0%b0%d0%b2%d1%82%d0%be%d1%80%d1%81%d0%ba%d0%b8%d0%b5-%d0%bf%d1%80%d0%be%d0%b3%d1%80%d0%b0%d0%bc%d0%bc%d1%8b</wp:tag_slug><wp:tag_name><![CDATA[????????? ?????????]]></wp:tag_name></wp:tag>

<wp:tag><wp:tag_slug>%d1%81%d0%b2%d0%be%d0%b1%d0%be%d0%b4%d0%bd%d1%8b%d0%b9-%d0%bc%d0%b8%d0%ba%d1%80%d0%be%d1%84%d0%be%d0%bd</wp:tag_slug><wp:tag_name><![CDATA[????????? ????????]]></wp:tag_name></wp:tag>

PowerPlay isn’t going to do a lot of good for me very quickly since I’ve chosen to buy impressions on radio streams for artists that are pretty obscure.  I did this because conversion rates (see web marketing 101) are higher in a narrower target, so if I try to compete for impressions/plays on Bjork’s radio stream, the chances that the users will actually like my music are considerably smaller than if I target people who like more obscure music like the constellation acts or something.  Going for Bjork is more like going for Britney Spears in that there’s a fairly diverse audience and the users are more likely to be fairly mainstream (Bjork being one of the strangest things they like).  Going after a band like Excepter or HRSTA is a better bet for me because these are people looking for fairly unconventional soundtrack-y experimental music.

In ten hours since I launched my first $20 Powerplay campaign (100 plays on radio streams of ten artists I chose), I’ve gotten ZERO plays.

On the upside, twenty bucks is going to provide my with at least 3 months of entertainment since I’ll have one more site to check in with a few times a day when I’m being neurotic.

The music industry is a mess.  The best discovery tools suck because the content owners are afraid of change, while the best music delivery systems are either incomplete (legal or illegal but private) or unreliable (illegal but public).

And legal or not, there’s no real integration between the streaming services and the OS environment.

Maybe the Chrome OS or the Smartphone market will change that.  I’m sick of storing tons of MP3s.

OH!  If these other music acts are so obscure, maybe I should buy their Keywords from Google.  Hmmm…

From Read/Write Web (Written by Marshall Kirkpatrick)

Did Google Just Expose Semantic Data in Search Results?  Well did they?  No. The results pages don’t expose any “structured data”

I really believe that Google is trying to avoid becoming everyone’s scrape-able Semantic Query Engine. There’s tons of at least semi-semantic data out there and google simply doesn’t present it to us.  They have it.  They understand it. They could give it to us. But they don’t.  I mean for crying out loud, imagine how difficult it must be for google to return image search results that are anywhere near as good as google’s image results are?   Does anyone really think that google is completely ignoring microformats or service-wide presentational semantic data (an example of this would be the html classes and ID’s assigned to elements on social network pages)?? Does anyone really think so?  While they’re looking at things like alt tags and nofollow tags and everything else?  Would google just ignore piles and piles of metadata? No.  Would they decide to not let us use it?  I think so.  

I think they’re doing a classic ‘roll-out’ thing, saving their best search technology for when they absolutely have to whip it out for competitive reasons.  This is cause to resent google to a certain extent I think.

1. I clicked to “Follow” Weekend Edition.
2. I got a weird impersonal messages sent “to me” via an “@ Reply” about how they’re getting the next episode of their show ready etc.  (why would they send that to me?  Smells like a strategy: “When someone starts to ‘follow’ us, respond to them with the latest tweet…” …a lot like automated thanks-for-the-add comments on MySpace, right?)
3. I responded suggesting they aren’t really using Twitter correctly.  
4. I gave it a day thinking I’d get a little response from their Team… Nope.  (What’s even worse than misinterpreting a medium, is not paying attention when people try to help.  Hello?)

Why would I want to be getting “personal,” direct messages from a media brand that wont respond to my own “personal” messages, when all of this is taking place via a platform in which I‘m already subscribing to a stream of anything that brand wants to say???  

Arghh!!

Funny, the first thing that came to mind was using rel=”spam”  …but really what brought this up was a site that isn’t necessarily “Spam” in the traditional sense.  The site was a pyramid scheme, the operators of which were posting ads on my local craigslist for “social media” something or other.  This isn’t by definition, Spam.

The Wikipedia currently says:

“Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages…”

The quantity is what makes spam spam, not the uselessness of what’s being promoted.

Maybe rel=”mal” as in malicious??

I’m not the only one thinking about this idea.

Assuming you are an ethical participant of The Cloud, pretty soon you should get an email from WordPress.com explaining the nature of the take-down.

[Anyway, my blog is back, obviously.  I guess I need to start backing up my blog? Jeeez.  What a hassle.]

[begin story]

I regularly blog about scams/spam on the Web.  It’s a way for me be discovered by, and to provide guidance to, people who happen to be googling around about some questionable content they find or are emailed.

One example of this is this search result for “paypal-cgi.com,” a site that mimics PayPal in order to trick people into handing over their paypal login info.  I come up number one for the search, and the title of the result makes it clear that you shouln’t trust PayPal-CGI.com… If you click thru to my post, I explain why these things exist and how to detect this kind of crap.

You see, I’m actually doing something good here.  And it’s good for me too.

Anyway, recently I encountered some scam crap on craigslist and blogged about it. And since my blog post contained a link to the spam/scam site I was exposing, WordPress.com’s evil-detectors went ape shit and my blog got automatically removed by wordpress.com.  

I was in the middle editing a post and suddenly my category selection buttons stopped working.  And there was a thing saying somethin like “you do not have permission to edit this..” or something like that.  When I refreshed the page, I got “The authors have deleted this blog. The content is no longer available”

…and my blog had been completely removed leaving only this scary screen saying: “This blog has been archived or suspended for a violation of our Terms of Service.”

Ironic. I got banned for merely exposing something malicious.

Current Spam-Filter technology isn’t context-aware. This is a slippery slope: Using words or links alone, without regard to context, to define what is untrustworthy content.

See the post in question for yourself HERE: 

Fortunately, about an hour later, I got a message from WordPress.com: 

from: Anthony – WordPress.com:

Hi,

Your blog was automatically flagged, as links to overnightcashexplosion.com were detected (and these are certainly not permitted). The blog is back – please remove all such links.

Best,

Anthony

Automattic | WordPress.com

I responded with:

if it’s a url in text, is that different in the eyes of your spam defenses from an actual link?  I’d like to leave the url if possible so I can still come up in searches for that url. 

WHat’s your take on that?

Thanks for communicating with me.

-A

Anthony from WordPress replied:

Hi,
Sure, you can leave it – I understand the context.

Best,
Anthony
Automattic | WordPress.com

So, there is a layer of discretion here?  That’s good I guess.

Del.Icio.Us Tags Gone Wild

On several occasions, I’ve set out to clean up my tags manually, but I’ve never made it very far.  It’s just too much work.

Maybe the coming overhaul to Del.Icio.Us will ad some of these needed features, although somehow I doubt it.

I’ve heard of the MOAT (Meaning Of A Tag) Project, and perhaps this could save us, but like many other ‘Semantic Web’ projects, I haven’t found a way, as a lay person, to utilize it.  At some point down te road,  maybe someone will make a Delicious-MOAT-erizer Web-App that will clean-up-shop-by-proxy and make the metadata available to the Semantic Web.

Got the rumor tip from Scoble (there’s no real info there so don’t bother)

Plaxo? Are you listening?  Keep doing what you’re doing, stay behind the scenes, work on enabling users to publish their own data, at will, in Semantic Standards as they become timely (now?) and stay independent of the little tug-of-war between closed, albeit increasingly API-enabled social apps.   You’re better than them!  Hang in there and you’ll be worth way more!  Don’t turn to the dark side!

Competition for traffic will get everyone using RDF and Microformats soon enough…  Semantics are like SEO 2.0… The next bandwagon everyone will want to pay way too much for.

Plaxo, you’re in the perfect spot to make money on this.  Think Virtual Private Networks, Semantic Publishing to the Web, and Semantic Productivity Tools at home.

Seriously.