I predict: tag spam

For one brief shining moment yesterday, the “Personal” tag at WordPress.com overtook the “Blogroll” tag for the top spot. Since then, however, it has fallen back to second place.

I still can’t comprehend the “Blogroll” tag. I use it when I mention other blogs. But perusing the posts at that tag leads me to believe that “Blogroll” may mean anything from “I like this post I made” to “I wrote a post today.”

Which sends a brain like mine into the concept of tag spam. If I were audacious, and wanted on every list over there, I could tag each of my posts with every conceivable category. Or, I could consistently tag them with the most popular tags (regardless of content), ensuring I’d be read, or at least looked at, by someone.

This isn’t much of a problem for the tags pages themselves, because each post would still show up as one of many. However: if many people started doing it, or if one intrepid hacker decided to post four hundred posts under every category on the planet, then it would get hairy. The tags would become meaningless, as would their rankings.

Though, it would be interesting to hold “tag” domination races — in good fun of course — where the tags actually do match the content of the post: WordPress bloggers would choose a category “team”, write about that category, and post as much as they can under it. The tag at the top of the list at a particular time wins. Or just gather with a group of friends to see if you can bump a tag up the list, possibly overtaking “Life” itself.

And one more idea: create a new category (e.g. “Secret Mojo Risin’”), and gang up on it to build its popularity. Or use it as a challenge for testing your writing stamina: try to bump your unique tag as high on the list as possible before your collapse.

This of course defeats the purpose of the tag page, which, although it could be an interesting social toy, is to give a feeling of who’s saying what from their heart of hearts; a cultural indicator. Manipulating that page would be great for marketing (or PR) stuff, and runs the risk of being spammed constantly.

Just a few thoughts. Don’t do it!

Unless it’s something cool (and honest) like Tag Domination. Then I’d love to see that.