Posting a question to the Network via Twitter etc. is great, and it really IS impressive that people provide answers so quickly. But one thing that I wonder about is the reliance on other people rather than our own referencing and querying skills. I’m probably more guilty of this than anyone I know – heck, I have a whole tag of “lazyweb” posts here on my blog.

What I find puzzling, and I’m not meaning to pick on Cole here, is that the same answers to the same question could have been found in less than 5 seconds with a properly worded Google query. Like this, for instance:

The trick is to know roughly what you’re looking for. Key words like “enable comments” might not just roll off the fingertips of everyone with the problem. But variations might work as well.

I’m really NOT trying to discount the power of the Network in pooling resources and brains, but we also need to remember that we have tools at our own fingertips to help enlist the huge databases of the Machine to help find information to solve problems independently.

Wait. Not everyone wants it to go away. There are two groups of people who benefit from spam.

• spammers
• google

Of course spammers won’t stop – they have a money factory running, and are locked in an arms race against the global online community in an effort to game ever larger lumps of cash from Google.

Google says they want it to stop. They came up with a wonderful solution that would have stopped spam in its tracks – the only downside was that the solution would have destroyed the network effects of the web by negating links. Baby? Meet bathwater. Meet half-assed “solution” that lets Google say “hey! we tried! Really we did!”

But, why did Google stop at a half-assed solution? Why not go fully-assed? Because they benefit from spam. Every time some moron stupidly clicks on a spam factory’s Google ads, Google gets a cut, and they happily send cash to the spammer.

The evil spam roaches inflict their spam on the various “web 2.0″ resources – anything that has an open form intended to foster dialogue and conversation – this spam gets indexed by Google, who then send the roaches a cut of all proceeds from the ads on those spam factory websites.

Anyone else see a conflict of interest here?

There is an easy solution.

Google: to stop the spam, you have to stop paying the spammers.

How to do that? Well, I’m not a multi-bajillion-dollar company stuffed to the rafters with PhDs or anything, but how about this for a start:

If someone reports a website as a spam factory, their adsense revenue goes into an escrow-like state until it can be shown to NOT be spam. They don’t lose any money if they’re legit, but they have the opportunity to lose their revenue if they are shown to be evil spam roaches. What to do with the revenue seized from verified spam factory adsense accounts? Google can’t keep it – it just maintains the conflict of interest. They should donate it all to the EFF or something similar.

Photo credits:

• Google sign
• Phat wad of cash
• Spam truck
• Web 2.0 Tag Cloud
• Roaches

The short version is: it’s less efficient at reading boatloads of feeds and items. But, the always-on, available-anywhere design of GR makes it worthwhile.

The long version is, well, longer. I still much of the niceties of BlogBridge (BB). Things like having a “photo gallery” view, for viewing images in feeds (I subscribe to a fair number of Flickr tag feeds, so this is quite handy). I’ve got a workaround for the star ratings that BB uses – I’ve created two “tags” in GR: “5-stars” and “4-stars” and have applied them to appropriate feeds. That definitely helps prioritize reading important stuff from all of my feeds/tags without having to hunt for them. Because it’s browser based, I can use native del.icio.us interfaces, so that feature from BB isn’t missed. The most annoying thing I’ve found with GR isn’t directly GR’s fault. I have to do a fair bit of clicking to get through all of my tags. I need to do some more work to add appropriate feeds to “5-stars”, “4-stars”, “3-stars” etc… so I can focus on levels of importance rather than subjects.

I do like the “trends” view in GR. Not because it is helpful in organizing or accessing information (it isn’t), but it’s kinda interesting in its own right. Here’s a screenshot as of 5 minutes ago:

I’m a bit surprised at just how much I’m reading. Almost 18,000 items in a month? I’d have never guessed that. Actually, almost half of that isn’t really “reading” per se, but “viewing”. Photos from Flickr. Which is why the “photo gallery” view would be great.

There are some shortcomings.

1. I’ve got a nagging feeling that by using GR, I am continuing to “feed the beast” – by teaching Google about what interests me, and by providing guidance about relationships between feeds and items.
2. There isn’t a “blogroll” or live OPML view of my tags/folders. BlogBridge lets me publish tags as live OPML documents, which is how my edublogs directory is managed. There isn’t currently a way to replicate that from within GR. Yes, I could periodically export a tag as an OPML file, and post that somewhere. Not the same.

All in all, I think I’ll keep using Google Reader for now. I’ll have to figure out how to reconcile my feed subscriptions with BB so that I can keep maintaining the edublogs directory, but that will work itself out somehow.

I couldn't do it.

My morning check-in took 5 times longer than normal this morning. Google Reader seems like it would be nice for a small set of feeds, but it becomes unwieldy on my subscriptions. Endless scrolling, lots of clicking on folders, and waiting for items to be added to the bottom of the page, with no indication of how far you've come through the items in a folder (the scroll bar eventually becomes pegged at the bottom, even if there are 300 items left to read). And GR has no concept of a photo feed, so they're all displayed inline rather than in a grid, making it take an order of magnitude longer to go through my Flickr feeds. Frustrating.

GR has no real concept of ratings for feeds. I can star feed items, but not feeds. I can tag a feed with "5 stars" or the like, but GR doesn't know to treat that feed any differently (like bubble items from a  "5 star" feed to the top of a list, etc…

So, I'm back to BlogBridge.  Ahhhh… that's better. There's no place like home… 

But, with all of the cool kids using Google Reader, I decided it's time to really give it a chance again. I dropped it like it's hot the last time I tried it because it doesn't have a feed star rating system, nor smart feeds. But, it's got a pretty flexible feed tagging system, which can be easily cajoled into performing these duties.

So, I just imported my feeds from BlogBridge to Google Reader via OPML, and I'll try giving it a shot for a week or so. I'm liking it after just a few minutes, but I'm not sure I can really switch away from BlogBridge.

I added a new tag called "5-stars" and tagged a bunch of feeds with it. By viewing new items in that tag, I can simulate the 5-star smart feed in BlogBridge. I can add 4-stars and 3-stars etc… as needed. Here's what my 5-stars tag looks like right now:

I'll keep trying it out for a week or so, and if I'm still using it then, I'll likely stick with it. So far, the single biggest reason to move to Google Reader is that it can actually parse the feed from OLDaily, which I've been missing for a couple of months now (BlogBridge has had trouble dealing with some of the slightly off-spec portions of that feed, but GR chews through it without complaining).

Update: Firefox has locked up on me twice now, forcing me to restart it. Safari is downright jittery when using Google Reader, so I'll have to deal with it. On the up side, synchronicity dropped this guide to "Getting Good with Google Reader" into my reader… 

I should warn, though, that since I am not a geologist (I don't even play one on TV) and since it's first thing in the morning, I do get some stuff mixed up. Just cringe, push through it, and look at the bigger picture – an interactive 3D geology simulation powered by Google Earth and freely available information.

The video is available in small H.264 format,which will work fine in iTunes and on iPods. It's also available in original large H.264 format and MPEG4.

And it is directly caused by Google’s PageRank and Adsense systems. They (as well as others, but primarily Google – take a look at any spam farm, and you’ll see prominent Adsense ad blocks) created this mess by enabling individuals to cash in on hijacking innocent websites that have enabled anonymous commenting.

A spammer can sit in his basement, run some scripts to find juicy targets, send out some probes, then unleash hell in the hopes that they will improve the PageRank of their (or their client’s) websites, in an attempt to increase Adsense revenue on those sites.

So, here’s the easy solution. If a website is shown to be associated with spammish activities, the Adsense account is suspended. And their PageRank is reset to 0. Take away the financial incentive, and the rules of the came change.

It’s time for Google to step up and show some corporate responsibility. The whole rel="nofollow" solution is a non-starter, since it only works if we all agree to break the nature of the web in the first place by devaluing all links contributed to a website. It’s not worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Now, how to define “spammish activities” – and, who gets to determine if a spam producer is guilty of that? There could be juries. There could be committees. Heck, it could become a social software tagging exercise, where the intelligence of the hive is harnessed to determine if something is spam or not. spamornot.com? Have an appeals process, to prevent abuse. Have a responsible governance system to ensure effectiveness.

It seems to me that it would be in Google’s best interest to protect the value of PageRank and Adsense. By allowing spam farms to co-opt both systems, they devalue both. By ensuring spammers are removed from the system, we’re left with a more realistic representation of the online advertising ecosystem, with (hopefully) better representation of the actual contributors and participants.

But, this has to stop. Now. It’s only getting worse, and is threatening to smother any semblance of openness left on the web (1.0, 2.0 or beyond).