My friend Christopher sent me a link to a recent story that made the front page of Digg. It turns out a web design blog discovered some of the best websites for solid design and web standards were for churches. Enough people agreed with the blogger and Dugg the story right up to the front page. Here is the top 10 list:

• Revolution Church, Kansas City, Missouri
• Soul Purpose, ministry in New Zealand
• Bethlehem United Methodist Church, Thornton, Pennsylvania (they might want to consider an alternate URL…it’s currently bethmeth.com which kinda sounds like a girl on drugs)
• River City Church, Jacksonville, Florida
• Generation Church, a ministry of another church in Seattle, Washington
• Church of the Incarnation, Toronto, Ontario
• The City Church, Kirkland Washington (this is the church that sponsors Generation Church)
• Edmond’s First Baptist Church, Edmond, Oklahoma
• Dulles Community Church, South Riding, Virginia
• Mars Hill Church, Seattle, Washington

In a continued effort to get a personal handle on this bucking bronco called web 2.0 I’ve noticed the emergence of a shift and I finally feel like I’ve seen enough evidence to confirm my earlier observations. The shift is this: the definition of spam has evolved and expanded and there’s a chance you might be a spammer and don’t know it.

Let’s start from the beginning and then talk about a shift: spam as we have come to know it over the last several years is unsolicited promotion from someone you don’t know and 99.9% of the time we’re referring to email as the medium by which that spam distributed. As people have gained an understanding of what email spam is, it has become more widely recognized and there are more protections in place for the average person against it. Likewise, all upstanding websites have confirmed opt-in email lists and the consequences for being labeled a “spammer” have created terror in the heartland for reputable marketers. None of this, unfortunately, seems to have led to much of a decrease in actual spam (according to my Gmail spam folder) but the filters are much better and our own ability to recognize spam is also better than it was even a few years ago.

That being said, spam has moved beyond email into web 2.0. There are spam blogs, spam MySpace pages, spam videos, etc. This seems to have been the natural progression of spam and although I don’t like it, I’m also not really surprised either. The shift, however, is that a comment on a blog or website may very well be considered spam now too. A spam comment (do we call them spamments?) is one in which a person comments and leaves a link to something outside of the discussion they’re commenting on.

For instance if I saw a blog post about iPods, a potentially spammy comment could say:
“Hey, I wrote a review of my recent experience with an iPod that died after six months. Check it out on my blog MicroExplosion.”

Whereas a clearly non-spam post saying the same thing would be:
I just had an iPod die on me after just six months. What’s the deal?

If you’re skeptical that this shift is taking place take a look at a few things here…
This guy made a pretty innocent post (but crossed the line as described above) on Digg and got drilled for spamming.
This PR professional talks about it happening on his blog too.

Today I was reading Chris Thomas’ blog where he’s giving away an iPod and a guy posted a potentially spamish comment there too.

It feels like the rules have changed and there was no formal announcement to let everyone know. I’ve seen this shift emerge just over the last year, or at the very least it’s begun to show itself more clearly over the last year but I can’t help but wonder if the same feelings we have now for email spam will soon be the same for comment spam. I know I’ve been guilty of this kind of commenting in the past and I really think twice now before I comment on a blog. There are no rules or guidelines here so it’s hard to grasp in some ways but if this is the way the spam tide is turning at least you can now say you were given the heads up here.

In November I referenced a website that did a great job explaining the common web design elements in many web 2.0 websites. It’s true that there is a web 2.0 “look” especially for the many startup companies. With that in mind I came across (via Digg) one person’s take on some old companies getting their web 2.0 makeover.

My friend Ray sent me a link to a great resource for anyone who wants to get more familiar with Digg.com. The post provides a great overview of what Digg is (resource for interesting user-provided news items) and how to use it.

I had the chance to connect with Greg Verdino, the Vice President/Director of Emerging Media at Digitas, about some words he uses to discuss, explain and understand web 2.0. I referenced the six categories of web 2.0 and he responded with three additional terms that help us continue to get our arms around this broad topic:

• Filters: A corollary to aggregation, these could be destinations that bubble up the best content in a category (like Digg), tools (like RSS) or even the recommendation engines in commerce sites like Amazon.com.
• Distributed web: The notion of a content provider/creator providing content in a widely distributed fashion. Rather than drawing consumers to a central destination or hub (any traditional web site) the publisher surfaces the content and syndicates it broadly (even if in a controlled fashion) so that the content finds users where they are as opposed to requiring users to come find the content. Think of widgets, RSS (yes, there is overlap between this and filters), affiliate players from companies like Brightcove or syndicated video/content models.
• Community: A term used in conjunction with conversations about social networking. Community can also include the entire social media category of blogs, photo/video sharing, etc.