Social Bookmark Spam : More pee in the beer

Alex Bosworth get's it right in his recent post, Social Bookmarking Vs Spam.

The more people flock to something, the bigger target it is for abuse. The more people turn to del.icio.us to find useful bookmarks, or digg.com to read the latest news, the more tempting targets those services become for spammers and vandals.

Which I couldn't agree with more. As I said earlier,

However, [Zniff social search] is doomed to fail if it enjoys any success: If it becomes popular, it is all to easy for tricksters to create false bookmarks for the sole purpose of inflating the ranks of chosen pages. It's the same lesson that Google is learning now with googlebombing.

Social Bookmarks are just the latest targets for abuse. Xeni Jardin in Wired nailed it:

Web 2.0 is very open, but all that openness has its downside: When you invite the whole world to your party, inevitably someone pees in the beer.

Alex suggests that the best way to protect the beer is with more complicated algorithms, just as Google revived search after the exploitation of early naive search engines. Here I have to disagree. The answer will inevitably be to use only trusted sources, and to give up trying to figure out who the bad guys are. Just let the people choose their own sources, recurse outwards through social networks, let small world networks do their thing, and *voila* you've got good data.

Or am I the being naive now?