A bunch of folks have been submitting the news that the FTC has shut down an ISP, called 3FN, known for actively recruiting scammers and spammers to use its services. The FTC noted "Anything bad on the internet, they were involved in it," and has pushed its upstream providers to cut off service. From the details, it sounds similar to the story from late last year when upstream service providers pulled the plug on another hosting firm, McColo (due to public pressure, not gov't intervention), and cut off huge amounts of spam, since so many spammers relied on botnets through McColo. While some scammers are apparently upset by 3FN going down, some folks are noticing that there doesn't seem to be a corresponding drop in spam as happened last time. Apparently, the spammers realized that having a single-point-of-failure wasn't a very good thing, and have built redundancy into their systems now. So, while many scammers and spammers did use 3fn, losing it hasn't been nearly as devastating as losing McColo. So, it's definitely reached that whack-a-mole stage, where taking stuff down makes for good press releases... but is it really stopping anyone?

In going through the regular complaints from newspaper folks about the supposed (but not really) "death" of newspapers, we've criticized the industry for almost never suggesting ways to actually improve the product -- only ways to limit the online competition. However, there's a second point that's worth exploring as well: they rarely look at ways to make their own jobs more efficient. We've questioned the wisdom of massive redundancy in foreign bureaus among newspapers, and Ana Marie Cox is similarly wondering about what a waste the White House Press corp. is these days. As she notes, they sit around "waiting to be told things." The White House press corp. never seems to break any stories, other than the ones just handed to them, and then you have all of the press corp. simply parroting the same talking points from the White House. That's not needed, nor efficient. At some point, newspapers will realize that there are more efficient ways of covering the news rather than stationing yet another reporter in a bureau where there are already a ton of stenographers who can do the same thing. That's neither efficient nor is it adding value.

Slate has an interesting column by Jacob Leibenluft that compares the relative reliability of Yahoo! Answers and Wikipedia. He notes that unlike Google Answers, which was shuttered last year, Yahoo's answers site has become quite popular. Google paid its contributors to answer questions, but Yahoo! only offers contributors points that entitle them to ask questions of their own on the site. Unfortunately, even the service's own users acknowledge that Yahoo! Answers isn't very reliable. Often a question will attract a dozen or more answers. Some of them will probably be right, but others will be wrong, and it might be hard to tell which is which. Leibenluft contrasts that to Wikipedia which, while far from perfect, tends to have accurate information the vast majority of the time. He zeroes in on three important characteristics that give Wikipedia the edge. First, whereas Yahoo! Answers lets each user to give his or her own answer, the Wikipedia process is geared toward producing a single article that represents the consensus of all contributors. Second, Wikipedia has a strong norm of citing outside sources when contributors disagree. Usually, when there's a factual disagreement, someone will go out and find a citation in a reliable source to demonstrate the correct answer. Finally, Yahoo! Answers closes a question after about a week, whereas a Wikipedia article is open for editing indefinitely. This is important because Wikipedia articles tend to get more accurate over time, as more and more readers visit them and fix mistakes. It would be interesting for Yahoo! to experiment with a wiki-based format for Yahoo! Answers, where users collaborate on a single collective answer to the question rather than giving a bunch of individual answers. The major difficulty would be that the site's point-based reward system would be difficult to apply, since several users would have contributed to the final answer.

Techdirt's own Insight Community is similar in some ways to the Yahoo! and Google Answer programs. The failure of Google Answers might be a reason for pessimism, but I think there are a few key differences that make TIC more likely to succeed. First, the community is sharply focused on a fast-changing industry where expertise is especially valuable. Second, TIC is focused on providing insight and analysis, not just plain facts. With factual questions, a customer will typically be seeking a single correct answer. But with strategic business questions, there usually isn't one right answer; companies are often interested in hearing about several different approaches, and there can be a lot of value in seeing the arguments that experts marshal for various options. Finally, Techdirt is much more selective about the experts it brings onboard, using experts' blogs and other writings as a way of identifying those who know what they're talking about and can communicate it clearly. That gives the TIC a great signal-to-noise ratio.

Following the Skype outage last week and the big SF data center outage last month, Business Week is exploring the fact that today's technology is often at the "good enough" level, rather than being designed to withstand a nuclear attack. We've certainly had previous examples of this as well. What may be more interesting, however, is that people are basically creating their own redundancies, rather than leaving it up to the service providers. In other words, redundancy is getting decentralized. Rather than making sure that a service provider can keep mission critical services up at all times, we're all learning to create our own personal backup plans. In the article, it discusses how Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim basically "backed up" his Skype phone account with his mobile phone. This is true in other areas as well. I have a DSL connection at home, but if it goes down (all too often, unfortunately) I have both an EV-DO account and a (in those really desperate times) dialup account. My email is available at a web-based service... but also downloaded to a local client. In other words, knowing that many of these services are really only "good enough" I (and many others) have simply started creating out own backup system for mission critical services. Of course, many of these redundancies offer additional features and benefits, but it's certainly distributed the "general uptime" responsibility out to the end-users rather than the central service providers.