Link farming’s saintly twin
Normally on the Internet (and, probably, in Real Life) someone comes up with an idea to make the world a better place only to see evil-doers use it to promote pornography, fraud or bad grammar. 3G technology was used to promote porn, e-mail is full of 419 scammers, and text messaging has turned our children (Oh! Our precious children!) into burbling illiterates.
But now the goodies are fighting back. Once upon a time Google’s link ranking technology was exploited by spammers taking RSS feeds to create link farms, drawing together unrelated (or, at best dubious) content in an attempt to boost their ranking on the search engine. Now Dave points us to Plagger, which allows you to easily aggregate collections of RSS feeds to produce your own blog or feed. It’s exactly what the link farmers do, but if it’s used by responsible (read: normal) people then the results are actually useful. For example, Dave’s started to aggregate all the feeds from Westminster MPs. I’m sure other people will find other good uses for it. There’s hope for the world yet.
