SRUTI sounds like an Indian dessert, but it’s actually a Usenix-organized workshop called “Steps to Remove Unwanted Traffic from the Internet”. It sounds like a fun event to have been at. I think the biggest battle ahead of us as we build Web 2.0 applications that aggregate, learn from, and redistribute user data is spam. Whether it’s through wikispam, geospam, trackback spam (the latest bane of my life), there’ll always be somebody looking to fence, farm, and foul any commons we create. The challenge is to build an architecture of participation that’s also an architecture of percolation, where relevant content bubbles to the top and irrelevant spam settles to the bottom. Whether it happens through trust (as in the address book anti-spam tricks that the article mentions), through Bayesian filtering, or any other tool, it has to happen.
