That explains why Gruber’s response seemed perhaps overly-defensive at DF this week. To allow comments or to not allow comments is one of the oldest in the blogosphere, one going all the way back to the first half of the last decade, but it’s been awhile since I’ve seen the issue raised in any kind of prominent way. Certainly I have not seen it since the rise of social media in the second half of the last decade, prior to the advent of Facebook and Twitter.

Quoting at some length, here’s Gruber reply:

You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response. I don’t use comments on Wilcox’s site to respond publicly to his pieces, but somehow it’s unfair that he can’t use comments on my site to respond to mine? What kind of sense is that even supposed to make? And if there aren’t any comments on DF, how are DF readers “adding to the noise”? (I realize, alas, that DF readers do sometimes leave noisy comments on sites to which I link. But how is that an argument for allowing comments on DF itself?)

What makes DF an efficient and effective soapbox is exactly that it is not noisy. My goal is for not a single wasted word to appear anywhere on any page of the site.

Is my soapbox bigger than Joe Wilcox’s? Yes it is. But that’s fair, because I built this soapbox myself. It’s my firm belief that all websites eventually attract the attention and respect that they deserve. The hard work is in the “eventually” part.

Used to be, back in the early days of DF, that those complaining about the lack of comments simply were under the impression that a site without comments was not truly a “weblog”. (My stock answer at the time: “OK, then it’s not a weblog.”) Typically these weren’t even complaints, per se, but rather simply queries: Why not?

Now that DF has achieved a modicum of popularity, however, what I tend to get instead aren’t queries or complaints about the lack of comments, but rather demands that I add them — demands from entitled people who see that I’ve built something very nice that draws much attention, and who believe they have a right to share in it.

They don’t.

The “it’s not a blog without comments” argument is one that was once frequently lobbed at righty bloggers, such as Instapundit’s one man band, Glenn Reynolds, from lefty bloggers on community, or “diary” sites such as Daily Kos and MyDD. In January 2006, when I was writing The Blogometer for The Hotline at National Journal, I offered some unsolicited commentary on the subject:

This certainly isn’t the case for all or perhaps even most right-leaning blogs, but there’s more than a strain of truth to this. Liberal blogs are on the whole more likely to enable comment boards than conservative blogs. … Liberal blog readers expect that a blogger make space available on their site to facilitate discussion, whereas conservative argue that anyone can start a blog and it’s not the responsibility of the blogger to give others a soapbox. It’s their soapbox, of course. The difference here is one of conservatives touting the virtue of ownership and individual initiative vs. liberals expressing a desire for community.

As lefty blog analyst Chris Bowers has observed, that there are more conservative blogs in the upper tiers, although the liberal blogs have in that range attract more overall traffic. Though there are doubtless multiple factors, one reason is because many liberals have gravitated toward these community sites. All those diaries on Daily Kos are people who otherwise might have signed up for a Blogger account and struck out on their own in the blogosphere.

So the online left and the online right tend to have slightly different ideas about what a blog is for, and on this point they’re talking past each other.

This is a little ironic, considering that Gruber’s political politics (as opposed to tech politics) are clearly left-liberal, as anyone who reads his site with some regularity has surely noticed. (Though he is surely an “Appublican” in the phrase of one clever comment, speaking of irony, here.) (And did I mention that The Blogometer was recently retired? For another discussion.)

Interestingly, Wilcox has now rescinded his previous challenge, and taken up Gruber’s not-actually-implied one, as he wrote (on his own blog, of course) in response afterward:

I argued that comments add to the narrative. Fine, I’ll try it John’s way. Most Oddly Together comments are missing anyway, following a blog transition that broke the links … As an experiment, as of today, I’ve removed the Disqus commenting system from this blog for two weeks. If I decide to permanently turn off comments, I’ll write a mea culpa post and apology to John Gruber.

So the game is afoot, though I think Wilcox will prefer his own blogging style, and Gruber will probably give at most five words to it.

Meanwhile, fellow thinking Apple supporter MG Siegler has weighed in to say his views on comments have changed over the years, and he no longer has them on his personal site:

I suppose my time at TechCrunch (and VentureBeat before that) changed my opinion. I came to realize that the vast majority of comments on popular sites are useless — or worse.

Like Gruber, I much prefer when people use their own sites to respond to something. That small barrier to entry seems to ensure that the quality of the discussion will be higher.

There are exceptions, of course, but they’re few and far between. And I feel like the comment problem on the Internet is getting worse, not better.

It may seem like everyone has a blog, but that isn’t truly the case. What is one to do? CK Sample III concludes in a post on his own blog:

Anyone who wants to talk to me can do so via Twitter.

I think that’s the right conclusion. Blog P.I. does have comments, but the only reason it still does at this late date is because I haven’t taken the time to close them (you may note that I haven’t taken the time to do much writing at Blog P.I. lately, either). When this site launched in 2006 and through the next couple years as I wrote alongside a couple of talented co-bloggers, this site did begin to develop a small commenting community (including Jim Treacher, now of Daily Caller fame).

But then two things happened: The first has to do with social networking: In late 2006 I joined Facebook and early 2007 I joined Twitter, and most everyone who writes about technology and politics did so about the same time or not long after. With only anecdotal and in absolutely no way empirical basis for the claim, I would say this happened to many other bloggers, those writing about technology and politics and those writing about other subjects. In fact, a general decline in blogging has been the subject of some discussion in recent years. I can’t say that I have seen that, but I also can’t say that claim is based in empiricism, either.

A second effect is probably much more specific to this site: in 2007 I started writing about comment spam, political comment spam, Twitter spam and even political Twitter spam. Guess what happens when you start writing about spam? That’s right: you become a target of spam. I had to rachet the controls on my spam filters up so high it began to block legitimate commenters, Treacher included.

Will I turn off comments here? Not unless I return to blogging here on a more regular-type basis, and I don’t have any immediate plans to do that. Let’s say I do pick up the pace at Blog P.I., how would I like to incorporate feedback? The answer, I think, is some combination of integration with Facebook and Twitter. Facebook’s Open Graph (and before it Facebook Connect) is the most attractive option, provided I can find someone to plug it in at a reasonable price. In this way, people can comment on this site while friends of that individual may see the fact of their comment here back on Facebook. Twitter does not yet support such a service, but they’re working on one, and as Twitter tends to be more germane to political communications (at least among those I follow) I definitely want relevant tweets here.

John Gruber may not want that, and that’s fine. His soapbox is indeed far bigger than mine, so he needs to think about managing his online presence whereas I would still be trying to promote mine (if I was actually doing that). There are probably many today who would still insist he is not writing a blog. That’s a matter of perspective, which says more about the wide range of opinion about what blogging is good for and supposed to be about. Some might even say that my own dearth of posts in 2010 has rendered it “not a weblog.” To which I would probably say: OK, then it’s not a blog. It’s still social media, albeit a relatively primitive form. Blog P.I. was state-of-the-art in 2006 but is behind the times today. (MyBlogLog in the sidebar, anyone?) I’d like to fix that, and maybe someday I will. In the meantime, I’ll be talking about politics and technology on Facebook and Twitter.

But this one was @CQPolitics, representing Congressional Quarterly, the venerable political news organization recently acquired by The Economist Group. [Also: CQ is a competitor of my former employer (and in the interests of disclosure: client of my current employer) and has at various times employed various friends and associates of yours truly.] I followed back.

I noticed almost immediately that there was a wide gap between the number of Twitter accounts following @CQPolitics and the number of accounts CQ was following back. According to the e-mail notification, the account had 17,929 followers and was following only 84 people. I had become the 85th. This is highly unusual; the very few Twitter users with a ratio of followers-to-friends this lopsided are typically famous-offline celebrities who have hopped on the Twitter bandwagon: Oprah Winfrey (@Oprah), Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) and Shaquille O’Neal (@THE_REAL_SHAQ) for example. Although these celebs have north of 1.5 million followers (Kutcher has twice that) even Shaq follows 555 people back.

I might have liked to believe, for a moment, that I should be flattered CQ had counted me among its Beltway media personalities worth following. But I didn’t buy that, either. I saved a screen cap of @CQPolitics’ friend grid, featured in everyone’s right hand column, and decided to revisit the matter in a few days. This is what it looked like last weekend:

A few days became last night, when I returned to the page and compared the grid to the one from a week ago, this is what it looked like:

Quite a bit different, no? I thought so, and decided to check it against TwitterCounter.com, which produces graphs of Twitter users’ recent follower/following history. First of all, I wondered, how many other users have been following @CQPolitics over time? The graph looks like this:

And then, over time, how how many other users had CQ’s Twitter account been following back? This is what I found:

Well, that’s something. What are we looking at? In the first chart, we can see CQ’s followers growing organically since April, only to drop off slightly in the past couple of weeks. But this drop-off is only the ripple from a much bigger change we see in the second chart: after following and unfollowing accounts as it climbed from 4,600 friends to 9,200 (more about this below), CQ decided to shed them all — in fits and starts and then, last weekend, it deserted the rest in one fell swoop: somebody spent an entire afternoon (at least) unfollowing some 9,100 Twitter accounts. Or they set up a bot to do it for them.

The resulting impression is that @CQPolitics has so much clout that it can attract a substantial following without having to reciprocate in kind. But as we can see, this impression is false. I assume they wanted their account to beat Beltway it-publication Politico, whose @Politico account has 16K+ followers but only follows two Politico-owned accounts. But as TwitterCounter shows, @Politico’s large and growing number of followers happened without them playing games with their Twitter followers. Now, that account is decidedly anti-social — but at least it’s honest. CQ took the shady route.

Even now, they are still playing games. As of this morning, @CQPolitics is following 126 accounts, relatively quite a few more than a week ago. But I am sure these accounts are expendable too, and part of the same ploy: follow a Twitter account in hopes they will return the favor, then once they do (or even if they don’t) unfollow that user in hopes they will not notice. The follow-unfollow routine is one of the spammiest practices a Twitter user can undertake; more sophisticated versions of this practice have gotten other accounts banned.

So, it turns out CQ is running a de facto spam Twitter account (even their tweets are piped in RSS content via Twitterfeed, which would be no problem under other circumstances). And I am all the more sure of this based on one very good piece of evidence: @CQPolitics is no longer following me.

Update: Well, now I think I know why they’re doing this — in fact, I was more right than I knew about trying to beat Politico. Fishbowl DC is comparing the Twitter followers of Beltway media institutions in a weekly post, every “Twitter Count Friday”. And it looks like nobody has wanted it more than CQ.

This tweet stayed up longer than the others. I learned about it just after noon today (hat tip: Brad Levinson) and finally was pulled shortly after I started writing this post. I’m of two minds on whether this is the same culprit: On one hand, the content of the tweet is much different — less mischievous, more promotional. On the other hand, that would be some coincidence, and Twitter’s recent phishing problems could be a bigger headache than its previous spamming problems.

The link behind the TinyURL is still available [Update: Apparently not anymore; if you really want to see it, just drop me a line], and it goes to a site owned by a company called Top Notch Media, Inc. that would very much like your e-mail address and some information about you while you’re at it. And hey, what do you know, it turns out Top Notch Media has been the subject of numerous complaints to Internet fraud watch sites. This is probably the last of it, although Exxon-Mobil may like to know that their logo is being used there, unless they already do, in which case somebody might want to alert Daily Kos.

Oh well, at least we know that Obama’s transition team is still aware that their Twitter account exists.

The last time I wrote about comment spam was in April, when I received maybe five to ten such submissions per week. In the final months of 2008 that number is up to something like five to ten per day. There’s no good reason why this should be — as you may have noticed, the second half of the year has been observably less bloggy than the first, and notwithstanding a few spiky links from big traffic-drivers, the daily visitor count has been at best unpromising. So why the surge?

My guess is that unsophisticated pliers of the trade have become a little more sophisticated, and so must be trying — and failing — more often and in greater numbers. I don’t think these are the Russo-Turkic schemers akin to Jonathan Franzen’s Gitanas Misevicius. Much of that, I believe, now defaults to spam filters.

Instead, these comments make it all the way to the moderation queue and seem to come from native English-speakers who have a website to promote, know a little bit about how search engines work, and aim to elevate the PageRank of their meager obsessions (or unwitting clients) in the sections of a blog they found on Google or Technorati. My blog, in fact.

And sometimes they come back. Earlier today, an algorithmic process denied a now-deleted comment access to my latest post, about the Phillips Foundation’s Journalism Fellowship Program. It went something like:

Grants to become a journalist, what’s next, grants to become a lawyer?

Not exactly a constructive comment, but snarky enough to wave through… except for the business e-mail account and URL of said business pasted into the address field. And the business? A Welsh company selling organic meat (a tautology, if you ask me) on the open Interwebs.

I hadn’t even noticed it until I received an angry e-mail from the bon mot’s possessive owner, someone whom I’d wager fits the above description. In the interests of unusually equal amusement, here’s the e-mail exchange in full:

In retrospect, I believe he was genuinely confused by the phrase “SEO strategy” — after all, if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t have left a comment in the first place.

P.S. And to my erstwhile correspondent: If you leave a comment this time, what the heck: I’ll give you one free non-piscatory fish out of the Akismet spam filter.

Update: In case you’re wondering, “I love reading Blog P.I. because…” is the default opening line if you start from the Contact page. And speaking of defaults, I wish WordPress wouldn’t promise that the “blog admin … will be able to restore it immediately.” I’ll decide when I’m able to restore it.

N.B. The title is a reference to DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America. Beyond the explicit nod to “The Corrections”, I count at least three more literary references that I swear were not premeditated.

Fortunately, perhaps, Google provides diagnostic tools for those curious about where the site has gone:

Alas, I don’t know enough about network security to make a diagnosis. (Dammit Jim, I’m a private eye, not a doctor.)

As of this morning, I can get the website to load in Safari but not in Firefox 3, albeit intermittently. The front page is accessible, but when I try to visit the blog, I get this instead:

In the past, Google has been accused of removing conservative-aligned content from YouTube and from Google News, but I see no evidence that this is what’s happened this time. I’m not even quite sure why Google is responsible for making this call or providing these diagnostics.

What’s most likely is the Spectator’s webmaster left a security hole unplugged and the site was taken advantage of by opportunistic spammers, which is something of a tautology.

I’ve put an e-mail in to a contact at the Spectator, and if I find out what happened, I’ll provide an update in this post.

Update: Looks like I called it. The site still isn’t working for me in Firefox, but via Safari, they offer this explanation:

We have received a number of inquiries regarding the fact that Spectator.org has been designated a “harmful site” by Google, because of outside entities attempting to use our site to distribute malicious software. We have been working with our Web hosting company to address the issue, and believe that it has been resolved and that our site is safe to visit, though there is a lag time before Google can remove the “harmful site” status. In the meantime, if you normally find us via Google, you can still visit us by typing Spectator.org directly into your browser, or by entering our site via Yahoo. Thank you for your understanding.

Some of this is driven by the fact that Twitter.jp, the Japanese-language counterpart, launched with advertising last month. Why ads on the Japanese version, but not the English? The conventional wisdom is that it’s harder to put advertising on the site later. That may be true, but of course, we already know that advertising happens on Twitter: many if not most of the accounts listed on TwitterBlacklist.com are primarily commercial in nature.

Which leads me to wonder, could Twitter ads be a partial solution to the problem of Twitter spam? After all, what these people are trying to do is reach many more people than their actual level of notability would attract. In lieu of other options, they’ve followed many more accounts than they could actually read, often using a bot to follow accounts automatically. How many of them would be willing to pay a small amount to place advertisements in the blank space underneath users’ left-hand sidebar? My guess is quite a few. In fact, so would quite a few others not presently engaging in spam-related activity.

One requirement for these ads could be that they must link to a Twitter account, which could then link out to where ever the advertiser wished. According to Valleywag, Twitter.jp ads do this, and it sounds to me like a fine way to keep the advertising conversational, like Twitter is meant to be. You know what isn’t conversational? A self-help guru whose promotions-only account follows 18,265 others with only 472 reciprocal followers.

Twitter advertising of this type would create an alternative to annoying other users with unwanted follower notifications while putting Twitter’s parent company Obvious on the slow road to profitability. Biz, Ev and Jack say they’ve been looking for a business model. Why not this one?

Regrettably, I was born with no mouth.

He was very understanding, writing back the next day:

thank you sir thank for your mail all is understood well i can question you just of the condition you gave any please kindly make a way we can both talk

At least I think he understood. In any case, this is the long way around getting to my real point.

As you may know, I run a blog here. As you can probably guess, I get my share of spam comments; most are caught by the Akismet plug-in for WordPress. But then, most are fully automated and advertise prescription drugs, gambling websites or sex acts that would probably boost my unique visitor counts if I mentioned them, but I don’t need that kind of traffic.

However, a small percentage of it manages to evade Akismet’s filters and find its way into my moderation queue. In some cases, they are only barely distinguishable from real comments. In some cases not listed here, I’ve approved comments that I am sure were intended only to improve the SEO of the website linked, but were interesting enough to allow through on their own merits.

Most are not, but this doesn’t mean they’re entirely without value. Some of them are clever, some are just amusing. I’ve been holding onto a few of them to discuss here, so let’s open up the queue, if for no other reason than now I can finally delete them:

Here, somebody is pushing what appears to be a YouTube clone, even using a joking nickname YouTube acquired once the site itself was acquired by Google. In fact, the site turns out to be a combination of Google’s input forms. Though the IP address indeed traces back to the United Kingdom, the author is not especially concerned with proper English spelling or punctuation. They also have no system for keeping track of which websites they have already hit, or they just don’t care. I’m leaning toward the latter.

Here is one that, at first glance, looks like a genuine comment: This was intended for a post that mentioned Ron Paul, just as the one above tried attaching itself to a post discussing Google and YouTube. But if you follow the link, it goes to a blog whose posts consist of only of one YouTube video and sometimes-relevant text copied from other websites — “scraped” as it’s called. And there’s a good reason why it sounds like a real comment: It was scraped from another comment from the same thread.

This one promotes yet another inscrutable blog, this time in a foreign language that I presume to be Turkish. I guess this because the IP address resolves to Izmir, Turkey. The one above resolves to Istanbul, Turkey. The two cities are not close by, so they are probably not the same person. But if Turkey is a hotbed of comment spam, that’s news to me.

Undoubtedly, this one is my favorite. Like the Wikipedia vandal whose edit summary consisted of “Blanked the page” or the panhandler who admits he needs the money for booze, “Sohbet” is admirably honest about his intentions. I might even consider throwing him a link, except that the website no longer exists — less than a month after he was trying to extract Google juice/build traffic for it. Also of note: the IP address resolves to Antalya, Turkey. Still, if Turkish comment spam is a known phenomenon, I can’t find any discussion about it.

Funny at first, but tedious. I get a lot of these, and it’s kind of similar to another common tactic I’ll get to in just a bit. Flattery will get you everywhere with some people, but not me. Also, the linked site is in Russian. Russian spam at least I am familiar with.

Better than YouTube! Quite a claim. Surprisingly, the website is well-designed, coherent and legitimate. For someone who just wanted to find videos related to a presidential or prospective VP candidate, it might actually be better than YouTube. So here we can start to draw a clear distinction: Some spam comment campaigns aim to promote fake websites that seek ad revenue or to promote another website. Others are spammy promotions for real websites; it’s very possible the creators of this website don’t know exactly what their SEO is up to. But I’m not particularly offended by this comment. It doesn’t add to the conversation so I won’t approve it, but it got the general subject matter of this website correct, it’s vaguely conversational, and it doesn’t represent itself as anything other than what it is: a pitch.

Lastly, this one I’m including not because it’s compelling, but because it’s so common. Also, because it represents the dishonest counterpoint to the previous example. Here, the commenter announces enthusiasm for the targeted website (in this case mine), then immediately starts pitching another website. Notice that his subject matter is completely off-base with what Blog P.I. is about. The targeted post — which I wrote in July, 2006 — included exactly one use of the word “wedding,” in a throwaway reference to New York Times announcements page thereof.

Predictably, the website being promoted is commercial in nature, but doesn’t offer anything for sale itself. What it does, though, is link to pages on a real wedding supply website, which presumably hired the spammer to boost their search engine ranking. A bit of rudimentary sleuthing reveals the SEO’s identity and company; he’s using his real name (which is something, I guess) and he didn’t even register the URL anonymously.

But I’m not going to single him out with a link or textual mention that could turn up in a search engine. He’s not doing anything illegal and, as noted above, similar practices are exceedingly common. I’ve been a critic of certain SEO practices, but I’m fascinated by also them, and clearly I think some tactics are better than others. The way I see it, if you’re going to do black hat SEO, why not do it with some style?

Also, the joke is on them: Every link in my comment section is automatically assigned a nofollow attribute.

At 3:42 a.m. last night, I received a notification that a Twitter user going by the name Cardiophile was following me. But when I checked out the account this morning, the sidebar looked as it does in the graphic to the right of these words. For readers who don’t know me, I am not one of the 5 accounts being followed.

So, mark this as the logical next step in the growing sophistication of Twitter spammers. Aware that they’re being identified by the obvious disparity in their following/follower counts, they’re now following an account just long enough — seconds, maybe — to send a notification e-mail and then unfollowing, so there isn’t the dead giveaway. I caught on, but then there are 350-some Twitter users who followed it anyway.

Earlier this week, a Twitter friend suggested that I simply uncheck the e-mail notification option. True, this would keep me from being annoyed. But there are two problem here. First, I would prefer to avoid changing my behavior because of spammers. But more practically, I wouldn’t know about followers I do care anbout and would want to follow back. Follow me?

Update: Stop Twitter Spam has also noticed this new technique, and has posted on the same subject.

As of today, that account follows (i.e. has friended) 13,000+ Twitterinos, only to tweet links to images of ho-hum abstract artwork. Amazingly, more than 800 people are still following this account. Shortly before reading his post, I found a teenager in Norway who seemed to be doing something similar. While he may in fact be using the service genuinely, he too was following thousands before he’d posted a single tweet. Today he’s following some 3,700+ others, but hasn’t updated for two days, when he was:

Now Twitter spam has taken a turn for the political. On Sunday, CQ’s Eric Pfeiffer told me that his account (which he updates only sporadically) had recently been followed by a horde of obviously fake accounts named for a current or former presidential candidate, plus a number. Most of the notification e-mails he had already deleted, but the others he forwarded to me. They are… interesting. For example, here’s the latest tweet from ChrisDodd53:

I think we can safely assume there are not 52 other Chris Dodds on Twitter. But did you recognize the content of that tweet? I sure did: it was scraped from today’s techPresident Daily Digest. And this pattern is repeated across all the examples of spam accounts he sent my way.

Herewith, a list of these accounts, and a link to the blog whence its latest tweet was scraped:

• Spam account: TommyThompson43
  Original source: Paul Soglin: Waxing America: Reflections Before the Election
• Spam account: RudyGiuliani32
  Original source: Educated Quest: A McCain-Giuliani Ticket? It’s Not So Far Fetched
• Spam account: HillaryClinton5
  Original source: North Star Writers Group: Watergate-Era Judiciary Chief of Staff: Hillary Clinton Fired For Lies, Unethical Behavior
• Spam account: MikeGravel3
  Original source: Innermost Parts: Thoughts on Mike Gravel
• Spam account: DuncanHunter45
  Original source: About.com: Christianity: Religion & Politics
• Spam account: JimGilmore89
  Original source: Below the Beltway: Virginia Senate: Warner 55% Gilmore 39%

You know, if these were simply attached to RSS feeds and genuine aggregators of political news, I wouldn’t mind so much. Yes, the aggressive, untargeted following is certainly annoying. But these accounts do not drive traffic to the sites where the words originated. This also makes the creator’s intent all the more inscrutable; they aren’t saying anything, they aren’t promoting anything, and they aren’t updated by hand. The only thing it’s good for, maybe, is souring users on Twitter. But I don’t believe Pownce or Google/Jaiku are really that underhanded. So I remain mystified.

Whatever the cause, this must stop. And it can. Unlike e-mail, which is traded from network to network across yon Internets around the globe, Twitter is administered entirely by Obvious, LLC. They have the same control over the Twitter network as Facebook has over its pages, and it’s within their power to stop it. I’ve previously suggested capping the number of users you can follow, relative to the number of users who are following you. Nothing too restrictive, but something flexible to keep Twitter accounts honest. Jack? Biz? Ev? Little help over here?

In the meantime, there is is already a website carrying the banner against this annoying menace. That’s Stop Twitter Spam, which is currently tracking complaints about spam on Twitter, including my post from last week. The site only barely gets into solutions, and mostly serves to highlight the problem. Most interesting of all is the Twitter Spammer List.

This list includes most of the candidate-based accounts I’ve noted here, and some others I hadn’t. It also mentions the examples from last week, but separates them into two apparent categories of problem Twitter accounts: outright spam and overactive followers. It also notes the number of follows vs. the number of followers and shows the difference as a ratio. The greatest disparity is HillaryClinton5. When the list was last updated, the account followed 2905 others, yet only 25 others followed “her” back. It’s not that HillaryClinton5 has friended the most people — that’s probably the design/art company mentioned above — but that she has the fewest followers. These numbers are a few days out of date, but still give a useful snapshot of the problem.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit nostalgic for the days when Brian Shaler was just following everybody in sight, like it was a game. But then, Shaler is an honest Twitterino. And almost everyone he follows also follows him back.

[L]ately, I’ve been getting an influx of new followers that resemble this character to the right – someone who is following thousands of people, with only a couple hundred following back. In this case, the new follower seems to be a web design studio in Beverly Hills. While I can’t prove it, I have a feeling that this person used a bot to automatically follow me (and a lot of other people) in an effort to take advantage of the fact that a lot of people will simply return the follow – in turn giving this person a new platform to pump their marketing message.

I knew the account he spoke of; I am one of those also being followed by the “Tripix Designs” Twitter account he mentioned. Like Ostrow, I’ve been followed by a handful of these accounts. Aside from inflating my follower count, I didn’t consider it a problem. But this morning I’m convinced.

At right is the sidebar for “Flyaxe” — a Twitter account that added me sometime last night. That’s what it looked like at about 6:30 this morning, Eastern time. Just a couple hours later, Flyaxe is following more than twice as many. Unlike Tripix, it hasn’t even updated once, so it isn’t clearly promotional. Flyaxe appears to be a “19 year-old dude from norway,” as the matching, recent and similarly empty Digg account shows. At least Tripix was honest about its intentions; Flyaxe could be a Trojan horse for just about anything.

The only solution is for Obvious (the under-funded Twitter-makers) to impose restrictions on Twitter accounts. Facebook imposes all kinds of restrictions on its users, and the result is a better experience — at least for those of us who prefer it to MySpace. So let’s say, you cannot follow more than 75% of those following you. Add more followers, and you can follow more people. But we know already that Twitter doesn’t scale well, so anybody following 6,000 people is doing something other than keeping tabs on that many friends. If you want a macro view of Twitter, Twitter tracking exists and so does Tweetscan. The Twitter API and the myriad tools built using it obviate the need to create one account following thousands of other accounts.

Unless, of course, you’re trying to promote something. However, as I’ve written before, Twitter is not especially useful for broad marketing. Thanks to tracking, one could hand-build a targeted list that could be worthwhile for the marketer and the marketed-to. Flyaxe, on the other hand, is wasting my time and his.