Found, while cleaning out some old blog drafts, was one of the ideas that popped into my head last summer: Is there a way to leverage blog spam to improve search engine standing?
Stupid is as stupid does
There is an effort underfoot to filter stupidity from Internet discussions. Seriously. Although it sounds like it could be a headline from The Onion, Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr are actively collecting a corpus of data in the hope that some Bayesian analysis will generate a reliable tool to intervene before a commenter makes their stupidity public. StupidFilter got BoingBoinged last month without much reaction but popped back up in the blogosphere this week with some ferocity.