Ok, so I’m sitting in my local Starbucks, sipping a delicious Venti Verona, on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Austin, Texas. It being too hot here to do anything outside, I thought I’d catch up on email, and then just surf around a little while, enjoying my lazy day.

Was I surprised when I tried to login to my Digg account and got the message: Sorry – bad IP address. What?! Bad IP address?! WTF, I wondered. So, off to Google I go (did I mention I love Google?) to find out.

It turns out that a few other folks have experienced the bad IP address problem before . . . whew, at least it isn’t just me. Apparently, to prevent undesirables from posting in Digg, they have chosen blocking IP addresses as their method of choice. That’s all well and good, and it’s certainly their prerogative to block whomever they wish, but is it an effective method of spam prevention?

While I’m sure this confounds many of the people using T-mobile’s Starbucks hotspots, I imagine blocking the Starbucks IP confounds spammers for all of about 15 seconds. Indeed, even I was savvy enough to Google proxy sites and login to Digg in less than a minute.

So, I ask, why bother with blocking IP addresses? To me, this is sort of like passing laws making it illegal to have guns. If you’re going to use a gun to break the law, why do you care that it’s illegal to have it? The only people this will effect is the law, or in this case, the Digg TOS abiding citizens. The spammers will continue on unabated while good, money generating, adwords clicking traffic is driven away in droves.

IMHO, blocking the Starbucks IP from Digg is not just an ineffective policy, it’s a bad idea.

Tags: austin internet marketing, austin search engine marketing, austin search marketing, austin sem, austin seo, can't digg starbucks, digg blocking starbucks, digg not working starbucks, digg starbucks, get page one, internet marketing, PPC, Reputation management, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, Search Marketing, SEM, SEO, Social Media Optimization, texas sem, texas seo

This entry was posted on August 26th, 2007 by Brian and is filed under social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.