RSS discovery and spam

A friend of mine (Mitchell Friedman) was chatting with me this morning about auto-discovery of rss feeds, which is a cool idea.

A couple of items he relayed:

• You can add a 'link' tag to your html that allows discovery of feeds for a given page. For example, my blog now has this embedded link: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://kippsterblaster.blogspot.com/atom.xml">
• For more on the link tag, check out this site
  
• This dude Jermey Zawodny has a RSS Auto-Discovery 2.0 proposal on his blog
• Those tricky spammers are at it in RSS, known RSS spam:
• the best one was a list of recent patents as far as I could tell so the headline was real. and the summary was real - that is they seemed to be recent patents...but the link was spam
• so now spammers can have mix and match legitimate content on the site with subversive content in one or the other or both.
  
• and since the rss community is one big wheel of interlinking content/sites with hub sites like sindic8 -- interesting arena for the spammers to attack
• and this is on top of the blog spam that has been and continues to be prevalent

The whole web/rss/blog spam and click fraud is an interesting topic. A colleague of mine at Tech (James Caverlee) is working on certain aspects of the web spam problem, especially looking at how page rank can be manipulated and vice-versa how to combat the problem.

I find the topic fascinating...if somewhat troubling at times...

Kipp