The XHTML Enemies Network
Posted on June 7th, 2005
One time I was doing a Google search for an obscure programming term and the same useless spam site kept coming up again and again. Someone had tried and succeeded at tricking Google into thinking their page was relevant to what I was looking for, even though it wasn't. Shady dealings were afoot. It's bad enough when that sort of thing happens at all, but it's double-bad when you're looking for something you can't find. So I made haste to Google's "Dissatisfied with your search results?" form.
There isn't quite an equivalent of that form in the world of RSS and ATOM feeds. Like any self-respecting egoist, I have a PubSub subscription for my name, my site, and all things me. Today that subscription brought back a match from iconlaptops.com, which had a link to an old blog post about Apple laptops. This happened once before a few months back-- it turns out that iconlaptops.com is a spam site. And probably likewise for the site it seems to get its content from, freshcontent.net.
I could edit my subscription to exclude those sites, but then I'd need to carry that blacklist over to subsequent subscriptions. This got me thinking about XFN, a way of using HTML links to represent the nodes of a social network. As Mark Pilgrim mentioned briefly in 2003, what's also needed is the XEN -- the XHTML Enemies Network. Saying you have friends is easy. Saying you have enemies takes a little bit more.
If I put a fictitious list of XFN links on my site, there wouldn't be much consequence. It might make me look bad, but only if you realized the links were bogus. If I defined a link to Mark Pilgrim, you'd really have to check with him to see if it was valid. Maybe if my shenanigans went on long enough he'd notice and take appropriate action, but that implies a lack of finesse and craftiness on my part. Since I'm executing this whole scheme in the first place, though, odds are I'm pretty crafty. If anything, the target of a friend link benefits from the extra attention.
Friends are a universal good-- in most cases, the more you have the better off you are. There's little or no cost for the target to receive a claim of friendship (real or fake). There's minimal cost for the source of the link. When you're talking about an adversarial relationship on the other hand there's equal cost on both sides. If it was unjust, the target would be more likely to reject the link and thereby attempt to discredit the source. In other media, this would be where accusations of slander and libel come into play.
Applying this to spam sites, a XEN file could be like a personal public hosts file. Instead of resolving domain names to IP addresses, it would list all the sites you never wanted to run across again for whatever reason. Software and web services would read your XEN file and use it as a filtering mechanism. If I'm at Google, never show results from sites in the XEN file. If I'm viewing RSS or ATOM feeds, give me a visual warning next to any link that points to a blacklisted site, or block the entry completely.
Going further, you could use your XFN to combine XENs from multiple people (mega XEN?) and get even more benefit. If I publish an XFN file, the value of those links to a total stranger is pretty small unless they have a prior interest in my social network. If I publish an XEN file, the common goal of blocking spam sites means sharing is in everyone's interest.