Each new advance in computer technology has been followed by a malicious exploitation of that particular technology.
After email became popular, spammers exploited it for advertising and for fraudulent practices. Email also brought an excellent delivery method for computer viruses.
Meta tags, metadata that appears in the HTML code of web pages, was designed to let website authors provide information about their pages' content. But these tags quickly became unreliable, as malicious website owners used them to deceitfully attract internet users to their sites, and search engines learned quickly to ignore the tags.
The open access movement has spawned the advent of predatory, open-access scholarly publishers. These bogus publishers exploit the author pays model of open-access publishing to collect author fees. They basically accept all articles submitted, gaining large profits off of research that would be un-publishable in mainstream journals. [See my review on this trend.] http://bit.ly/cVZmBs
For the past ten years, we've been told that the next big advance in internet technology is the semantic web. History tells us that the semantic web will be exploited maliciously.
How exactly that will occur I do not know, but I am sure it will occur. Will semantic spammers load documents with bogus linked data that points to advertising instead of the page it's supposed to point to? Will malicious and fraudulent RDF triples distort reality to the benefit of bogus, work-at-home companies?
I hope the designers of the semantic web are incorporating spam-proofing algorithms into their designs and code. Otherwise, if it ever gets off the ground, the semantic web will turn into another Trojan horse.
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