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Blogging - Signal to noise ratio

By: Qwaider

On:Thursday, August 30, 2007 2:26:52 AM
In:Thoughts
Viewed: (4868) times

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Signal to noise ratio in the world of electrical engineering (or audio) (SNR or S/N) is defined as the amount of desired signal or power or sound compared to the accompanying noise. Conceptually, this can be applied to anything. The blogosphere included.

If you've been around for a while you will notice that there are certain issues that growing at an exponential rate. The longer you are around the greater a target you become to attacks on multiple victors. From Spam to malicious code injection to social engineering. The list never ends. But that's not all...

Add to that additional hysteresis of sifting through tons of posts for the gems out there, and you come across a real huge problem that is looming over the whole blogosphere

First, S/N of spam has shot up considerably in the recent days to the point it warrants serious consideration. I have been on the forefront of battling spam and decided to create my own system that is capable of capturing 99.99% and has provisions for automatic blocking and banning. So far, it's been working great

But a quick look at the numbers shows a frightening reality, only 10% of all this spam is actual meaningful related comments that are by people who are not trying to sell something, promote another or worse, trying to infect your computer with some malicious virus

The problems are countless. As a site owner every one of us has the responsibility to do the diligence to make sure that any outgoing link is not going to some malicious site that will take advantage of your users. Or even annoy them (as I mention here). The reason for doing this is simple. People take your good name (if any) for granted. And might trust you unconditionally. A click out from your site to a malicious place where they're fooled into installing something on this machine might not be the best thing you do to your reputation

A S/N of 10 is really bad. And from my projections, this is getting worse REALLY fast! I am not sure if there is anything anyone can do about this.. Other than these people realize that people are just NOT going to click their stupid links! EVER!

I know I will do everything in my capacity to stop this from happening

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Memories....

#1
globalorama
Said
On: 8/30/2007 7:09:43 AM

a good post.

thanks Qwaider for all you're doing on your blog and on Qwaider planet.

#2
Mariam Ayyash
Said
On: 8/31/2007 7:26:31 PM

awalan, do you have the spam filter for public use? as a plugin or soemthing, it would be great... i currently use akismet on wordpress, and it is wonderful, although im very new to the bloggin community, it catches at least 50 a day! kolhom chinese b3eed 3an el hnood :)
another thing i do is pull over any comment with a single link, i dont think the spammers are aware of it, that is the problem, they are simply noiiiiseee

thanian, fata7et mawaje3 regarding the gems in blogs, problem is now (especailly jordanian blogs) is that ALL blogs get listed, and there is little hints on how to filter, so there is no difference between going to itoot or jordanblogs, even though itoot hand selects the blogs, but looking at what they currently have they are really no different from a single page a jordanblogs, as for global blogs, it is much easier to find a focused blog on a subject you are interested to read about, but the quality of these blogs are ...mmmm SNR 0.5!
technorati is a search engine within blogs that i can easily say is a tremendous nightmare to me, i never found anything relevent on it! bad search engine. have you ever seen bessed.com? or Google Custome search engine? those might help one day... not today though

#3
Qwaider
Said
On: 8/31/2007 8:28:47 PM

I'm planning to roll out a web-service sometime soon. It would give color coding to comments based on their IP. I don't want to get in the business of inspecting the contents due to privacy concerns. But that will take a while
Akesmet are good, but I've surpassed their monitoring system in the first 3 months. And now I have a database almost 10 times larger than theirs. With tons of information for me to mine

JoBlogs and iToot are completely different things. They're not the same. Joblogs is open for everyone while iToot is open to a select number of people who share some common ideas. Making it a stagnant pool of single sided thought and completely irrelevant to the real content of the Jordanian blogosphere

As for myself, I am using Qwaider planet for all my needs. It works perfect for me. Gets me the details I want. I even aggregate it's feed here on my blog so I always have a fresh list of articles to share with the world. Ready at my fingertips

Qwaider planet also boosts the subscribers search hits, rating in Alexa, Google and Technorati.
If you look at anyone of the planeteers you will notice how many hits (direct and indirect) they're getting from Qwaider Planet and I assure you. It's all worth it.

#4
Samir
Said
On: 8/31/2007 10:12:13 PM

I agree, finding something good to read is becoming harder.. it's very annoying.

It's not really the focus of your article, but: when the Noise/Spam increases.. the SNR falls, and not "shoots up"..

ba3dein near the end.. the SNR is 0.01, or perhaps 10%

Sorry mate, i just had to let it out!

cheers!

#5
Mariam Ayyash
Said
On: 9/1/2007 1:16:15 AM

yes itoot is irrelivent, but its as much confusing and overloaded as jordanblogs, and information is not categorized correctly, see, when they invented blogs and the concept of user generated content, nobody knew the evil it will bring along, its not about "too much information" (which google solved) its about "too much trust", for instance in qwaider planet the only way i can get to focused blogs (im not interested in reading about somebody's bla bla) is by tags, not a lot of people tag their posts (i personally dont) and even if they do, they do it according to THEIR standards and understanding, sometimes it is frustrating searching technorati for user generated content about for instance, rents in sydney only to find yourself in blogs bitching about rents in sydney, the writer mis-tagged the blog from "social bitching" to "rents in sydney" and i am caught in the middle!
same goes to almost all user generated content, so the real question is how relative alexa really is! i once checked the words people search to get to my blog and it was terrible, they were looking for (mathalan) mother teresa only to end up in my "damn mother terrisa's opponent" post? its not fair, and it is getting more frustrating, and something's got to be done about it :s
Samir, i read it 10% SNR, didnt realize it was 10 7af :) and i made the same mistake, i meant 0.5%, so i think he meant 10%... why am i digressing? good night