The loosely-described Web 2.0 has done nothing short of increasing user interest and interactivity in the Internet’s content.

…And spammers are starting to realize and take advantage of this fact.

Where the population surfs…

…the spammers and avid self-promoters are sure to follow. The presence of ads on the Internet is at least tolerable, as they power some of the most essential websites. But when self-promoters and blatant spammers begin to invade your life on Facebook, Myspace and Twitter – that’s very different.

And the worst part is, they either try and hide the fact or hijack real account to do their dirty work. Twitter will remain the best example in this post: I don’t know how many of our followers are either blatant self-promoters or else hijacked accounts that either alternate between real and spammy tweets or else simply spam all the time.

These are either people who quit their day job to “go make Bill Gates money on the Internet”, or else just another sore sign of the economy’s state.

Spam 2.0 Interactivity

Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia, WordPress/Blogger, and other either anonymously or low-threshold sites are all subject to editing by self-promoters, as much as they try to combat the fact. Blogs (including us) deal with either automated or human-crafted spammy comments, and user-editable sites like Wikipedia deal with self-linkers constantly as a target of high-pagerank/user-editability abuse.

And it doesn’t stop there, nor will it: anytime a site has the ability to perform user interaction, spammers will take the opportunity to abuse the publicity by leeching off of it with their self-promotional content.

There IS a difference

Self-promotion, marketing and spamming are not the same thing despite how we interchange the terms here. True, non-spamming marketing attempts like ads, independent blogs, PR accounts and similar veins are valid attempts by Marketing personnel to take advantage of the Internet to market their company.

However, when you have “John Smith” whom just happens to follow everyone and tweet about one particular company/website constantly (along with his 6 sockpuppet accounts) and the random blog comments containing little more than keywords and a link, that’s an entirely different subject.

Cisco, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft and other all have blogs and Twitter accounts, but they don’t go spam comments to other people’s blogs or follow random people (hoping for a return) while tweeting non-stop about their website.

And how do you stop it?

We have a pretty decent article on Unobtrusive Anti-spam, a method of blocking automated spam without harming the Web 2.0 experience (or SEO). However, for purely user-driven sites like Wikipedia and friends, a healthy following of spam-proofing editors is needed to revert the constant threats of spam.

And remember: don’t feed the spammers. If they follow you on Twitter, block them. If they send you a Myspace/Facebook friend request, deny it. Revert Wikipedia spam links. Delete spammy blog comments, despite how much they complement you before linking to their content.