Problem with Trackbacks

Recently, I got a trackback from a blog that seemed to have very little in common with my blog or the specific post I had. Upon further review, I found that the blog belonged to purveyors of a nasty little program, called DigBack. This is how they pitch the idea:

So your a blogger, and you want to get more people reading your blog posts. DigBack is the tool that will help you. When you make a blog post, that’s it, your post is published for someone to read if they happen to come visit your blog. So how do you get traffic immediately to your latest posts? Easy, with DigBack. DigBack will find and locate blog posts from other bloggers, and notify those blog posts that you have a blog post with similar content. This is all done through the trackback system. Say you write a blog post titled “Donald Rumsfeld Resigns”. DigBack will find posts from other blogs that have written something about Donald Rumsfeld’s resignation, and ping their blog post using the trackback protocol. Now there is a link on that other person’s post linking back to your article. People that visit that person’s article, can click the link to see what you have to say about Donal Rumsfeld. DigBack will continually look for similar posts all around the Internet on a continual basis.

Despite the spelling mistakes, it sounds promising…I looked further to find out how they establish whether two blogs are similar…Here is the relevant section from the FAQs:

How relevant are the blog posts DigBack finds?
Currently all posts found are based on the unique keywords you use in your post titles. The new version of DigBack expected to be released soon uses artificial intelligence to determine if found blog posts are similar to blog posts you write, making the system even more accurate.
…

No wonder, I got trackbacks that did not make any sense…Now my intention in discussing DigBack is not to encourage its use but rather discuss the limitations and potential abuses of the underlying Trackback system. Trackbacks were originally conceived and developed by Six Apart. The idea behind it was to enable distributed discussions that can be carried out on multiple blogs, with trackback providing the mechanism to cross-reference these different threads. For those of you who want to know more about trackbacks, Douglas Karr and Wikipedia have excellent descriptions:

The Trackback mechanism used to be a great way to carry out distributed conversations, but as the size of blogosphere has increased, this mechanism has come in for a lot of abuse from a number of bad agents. Some of these abuses have been:

Spam Trackback: The goal of Trackback spam is to insert an outgoing link on a blog to divert traffic to a totally unrelated URL for various financial gains. Typically, sites generating spam trackbacks don’t have a related post, or content related to the target blog.
Referral spam: The spammer links to the target blog from their site, and then pings target blog through their link, thus creating a reference and link to their site on the statistics referral log of the target blog. Now many people list “referrals” on their site publicly, so by spamming referral logs, not only does the spammer get a link on referral log (which is picked up by Google) but may even get a link on the main page of the target blog.
Robo Trackbacks: These are programs like DigBack, that are slightly more sophisticated than trackback spam in the sense they send out more targeted pings to a small set of blogs based on a computed criterion. This computed criterion can range from simple keyword matching, tag matching to more sophisticated natural language analysis based matching of blog content.
Random Trackbacks: At times, in order to attract attention of a fellow blogger, bloggers send trackbacks. Such trackbacks can become a nuisance if the bloggers don’t take the time to read and identify a specific related post based on which to connect with the target blogger.

The underlying weakness of the trackback system is that it treats all blogs the same despite their community behavior. So there is no quick way to a blogger receiving a trackback to quickly judge the quality of an incoming trackback. Also, if a blogger spams another blog, there are no penalties for such actions. What is needed is a better carrot and stick system such that it provides appropriate incentives to all bloggers to maintain the correct linking behavior. Some blog rating services like Authorati, the good blogs might help a little bit here but they need to provide better integration with the trackback system…Anybody up for developing such a system?

Blogging in India

I am in India for a couple of weeks visiting family and wrapping up some business. Before coming here I was excited about the prospect of working in India, as most of the family we are staying with, now have broadband. In fact, while packing for India I even packed a wireless router that will enable me to be somewhat mobile with my laptop.

After the long flight to India, when we finally reached home, I turned on the family computer to check out the broadband (BSNL ADSL) connection. No Signal…Apparently the BSNL server was down. I was told, that it happens occasionally and this might even have something to do with a worker’s strike against privatizing BSNL (it’s a government owned and run organization at this point). Oh well…

The next morning, I got up and turned on the computer and lo and behold the broadband connection was working. All I needed to do now to get productive was to get broadband connection to my laptop. To address that, it was with some relish that I got into setting up the wireless network. The first thing I needed was a voltage converter to convert the 220V power supply to 120V that my router eliminator will accept. I bought an off-the-shelf step down transformer. After plugging in all the required components and the power supply, I was ready to rock and roll. Unfortunately though, I realized that after an initial indication that the router was working, the power light was no longer turned on. I fiddled around with all the combination of power strips we had, even going out and buying a new power supply that generated the requisite 7.5V and 1Amp directly from 220V power supply…still no dice. I unscrewed the router, figured out how to reset it and expectantly plugged it in again…still no light. (I later found out that the issue was that the step-down transformer I bought off-the-shelf was not working as specified and was essentially passing through the voltage unchanged. This had caused a power surge which had actually fried the router).

I was getting frustrated and I had to get some work done. So I decided to move onto plan B which was to takeover the family broadband connection. I unpacked my 40ft Ethernet cable to run the cable from the study to the living room so that I could work and still be somewhat social. Now the issue with running a long cable in India is that all walls are solid concrete and there is no way to drill a hole that goes through. I had two options…Run the cable through the window or through the doors. After a quick family consultation, we shot down the idea of running the cable through the window as it would mean that we will have the leave a couple of windows open – a huge security risk. So I ran the cable through the doors going through 3 doors in the process. After tying the cable to a few nails, to get it out the way of kids, I was ready to be productive…I turned on the laptop…It was lovely, the speed was decent, Skype was working and I could access all my email accounts. I was cruising and beginning to feel connected again when suddenly the connection stopped working…Apparently somebody had closed one of the doors and that had killed the Ethernet cable. The whole system was down again.

The only option I had now was to either work in the study or to move the DSL model to the living room. After some deliberation, I decided to move the modem over to the living room and plug it into the telephone socket there. Things worked for sometime and then boom…the power went out. I was waiting again…

After waiting for a couple of hours for the power, I finally send out an email to my dad about our travel plans in India. I called him up to ask him to look for it on his computer. He gave me a hoarse laugh.
“It won’t work” he said
“Just turn on your computer and check your mail, you should have it. Also print out a copy for reference” I said, pointing out the obvious.
“It won’t work”, he repeated.
Now my dad is no tech wiz, but he can usually read his emails without any problems.
“Why not?” I asked getting a little bit frustrated.
“Well, there was a burglar attack last night in the neighborhood and the thieves took the telephone cables outside a number of houses. They plan to extract the copper from the wires in order to make some money from selling it” he explained.
“So I guess the broadband connection won’t work”, I stated the obvious, with a calmness that even I was surprised by. I guess I was getting used to being back in India.
“It will take just a couple of days and should be ok when you get here” Dad said reassuringly.

I don’t mean to imply from this post, that things are not improving…things are improving in India in a big way – roads are better, BSNL is improving the standard broadband speed from 256Kbps to 2Mbps in the course of next couple of years and even my dad and father-in-law have both a cell phone and a computer – but there is still a long way to go.

Future of Blogging

Gartner recently came out with a new report with company’s top 10 predictions for 2007. I haven’t seen the report (it costs $995) but their press release does a good job of summarizing the predictions:

Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007.

By our count there are already 80 million active blogs which means that the blogging trend is just about peaking already. AP report has more background on the basis of this prediction.

Could blogging be near the peak of its popularity? The technology gurus at Gartner Inc. believe so. One of the research company’s top 10 predictions for 2007 is that the number of bloggers will level off in the first half of next year at roughly 100 million worldwide.

The reason: Most people who would ever dabble with Web journals already have. Those who love it are committed to keeping it up, while others have gotten bored and moved on, said Daryl Plummer, chief Gartner fellow.

“A lot of people have been in and out of this thing,” Plummer said. “Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they’re put on stage and asked to say it.”

That’s no knock on blogging. Plummer noted that this leveling-off dynamic plays out all the time, though it often comes as a bit of a surprise when it hits things that had achieved quick popularity.

Tony Huang of Blog Herald had the following take on the report:

I’m not sure how someone so esteemed as a Gartner fellow could be so wrong about blogging. One need not need any numbers, but only simple logic to look no further than the rest of the world to see the growth of blogging.

Even if the rate of growth were to slow down in North America, the blogosphere is exploding in places such as China and India — a country of almost a billion people, where one of the official languages is English.

In fact, as the penetration of internet access and broadband access catches up to North America and Western Europe, one cannot but fathom that like a rising tide, it will influence all manner of internet activity. Including the means to provide a voice to the potentially disenfranchised, or those whose voices may not be used to the freedom of speech.

(Yes, that was a reference to blogging).

Clearly, I expect blogging to continue to take off through 2007 and beyond; the only issue is, will professional services like Gartner, or even Technorati, be able to make enough inroads into the Non-English speaking blogosphere to measure this kind of data accurately?

This is an interesting debate…Typically I don’t get involved in futuristic predictions and debates like the ones about, but this one goes right to the core of citizen journalism and web 2.0. Overall, I tend to agree with Gartner’s prediction because Blogging is hard. It take a lot of organization to create a good blog post and most people (without meaning to sound haughty or overbearing) don’t have the skill, patience or the time to sustain the effort. As a totally unscientific example, I talked to more then 10 people about blogging, at a recent TIE event in Silicon valley. All these guys are accomplished in their areas (mostly tech) and knew what blogging was but did not blog. The main reasons they cited for not blogging was that they did not fancy themselves as writers, or did not have the time to write interesting stuff.

To me, the number of blogs peaking, does not mean an end of participative citizen media. It just means, that we are going to need better technology, to enable more ad-hoc community participation, without requiring users to blog. In practical terms this means more innovations in comments, forums and bulletin board technologies to enable non-bloggers, to participate and contribute to conversation in a fruitful way.

Another factor driving this trend is that most blogs need to focus on a particular topic, to sustain readers interest. This means, that if a bloggers wants to participate in a discussion, outside their blog topic, they will need to participate as a non-blogger.

I suspect based on these new innovations we will see the emergence of a different community of users – the on-line citizens (as opposed to bloggers) – who participate in various online communities on an ad-hoc basis. Active participants in these communities will be grass root inflencers in their respective (local) communities. Of course, these participants will be very important to their respective communities as key sounding boards and drivers of majority opinion. What do you guys think?

Influence Scale

Check out the post at TrivialTV blog that details, via a graph, the relationship between inbound links and visitors to a site (Great data and thanks for making it public)…

In August 2006 I painstakingly harvested data to investigate the relationship between # of links and vistors/day and the effect of syndicates. I’ve only shared the data with a few friends so far, but one of them has been hounding me to share the plot with a wider audience. With Matthew Hurst’s post about Readers Or Links over at Data Mining today, I decided it’s worth going off-topic for a day. So here’s the plot:

I only included sites that used sitemeter with public data access and that were registered with technorati. Nearly 1800 different sites are represented in the figure.

In aggregate terms, the graph is a good proof that inbound links drive traffic (of course some links are more valuable then other). But it still does not answer the questions about influence…Which of the sites, listed in the graph above, have more influence. Check out this interesting post on the ebiquity blog:

Matt Hurst has a great example illustrating why measuring influence as inlinks (what Technorati does) is too simple. Here are two blogs, their inlink rank as computed by Technorati, their average daily visits as computed by Sitemeter, and the trend in visits over the past year.

blog rank visits trend

Michelle Malkin ~19 ~120K steady

pink is the new blog ~117 ~200K increasing

As Matt pointed out, measuring readership with tools like sitemeter is problematic. As I write this I realize that I read Matt’s post through his feed in Bloglines, so his blogs will not have registered a visit.

Of course, it all depends on what you mean by influence which is mostly a function of why you are interested in it. For example, if your goal is to sell shoes, ads in “Pink” probably have more impact. If you want to push your new book “Taxes are evil” then Malkin’s blog is the way to go. So influence also has to be measured with respect to the community you want to influence.

Other factors that can determine influence are the kind of visitors that are coming to the site (meaning are these influential visitors or not), what these visitors are doing once they are on the site and how engaged are they … Check out our previous post on the subject that deals with how the engagement level of the users can be gauged using the attention data. Another measure of the influence of blogs can be the number and quality of comments. Of course without a universal measure of the quality of comments, relying on just the number of comments, could be very misleading. Bloggers can just turn off the spam filter and that will generate a huge number of bad comments and thereby game the system for judging influence. But with a common gauge of comment quality, the number of comments can be a useful measure of influence. Developing and popularizing a universal gauge for the quality of comments, is a tough nut to crack but its importance cannot be overstated. I am looking forward to more research (I am waiting for the paper that ebiquity guys mentioned) and new ideas on how best to measure influence…Indeed the future of online communities might depend on it.

De-Portalization

There is a lot of buzz of late in the blogosphere about this idea of De-Portalization. Fred Wilson got the discussion started and coined the term to discuss and suggest a strategy for Yahoo!. Edgeio explained it the best with the following pictures (Great job with the pics guys).

The following 3 graphics illustrate what we believe has happened already and is likely to continue. The first picture is a rough depiction of Internet traffic before the flattening (View image to see the full picture)
The second picture is a rough depiction of today – with the mountains still evident, but much less so

The third picture is where these trends are leading. To a flatter world of more evenly distributed traffic.

I totally believe that the foothills are rising. The trend is driven by easy to use publishing tools and a thirst for more communities and authentic discussions among the populace. Still, I am not sure that rise of foothills means that the mountains are not going to as high as they used to be… I recall a similar discussion in 2000 when the product/price comparison engines were all the rage. People were debating the value of a brand and why anybody would pay a premium price for a product on Amazon.com. I suspect the mountains, that represent the well known brands on the Internet will continue to exist and even thrive. If anything, the rise of the foothills means that the mountains would become even more important, as a bearer of mass sensibility and will behave like mass media. The reason for this is really credibility…The mountains (like mass medium) bring credibility to the discussions in the foothills, and even though, there will be a lot more discussions and participation in the foothills, the denizens of one foothill will need to refer to the mountains to make sense of the discussions in other foothills. What do you guys think?

Other discussion on the subject on the web:

Kevin Burton Techmeme Mike Arrington Syntagma Keith Teare’s Weblog Dan Farber at ZDNet Mark Evans Fred Wilson Ivan Pope at Snipperoo Tech Tailrank Collaborative Thinking David Black Surfing the Chaos Ben Griffiths Dave Winer (great pics) Kosso’s Braingarden Dizzy Thinks Mark Evans

Corporate Blogging

I just finished reading the latest Scoble book – Naked Conversation. This book provides an interesting take, on how Blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. The driving force behind the trend, is the advent of social media and changes in consumer attitudes towards business-as-usual, that is getting companies out of “command and control” and “batten down the hatches” mentality, and forcing them to engage their customers in real conversations. San Jose Mercury News had an article with a number of examples, last week, further confirming this trend.

Perhaps best known is Mark Cuban, a billionaire who sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999 and who owns the Dallas Mavericks and co-founded HDNet, an all high-definition television network. His blog is ranked No. 105 in the Technorati blog rank. His fans read him for his idiosyncratic take on technology and sports, YouTube and the media.

At Sun Microsystems, they have gone blog crazy — 3,000 Sun employees (close to 10 percent of the workforce) are bloggers, riffing on topics light and geeky, from “techno celebrity sightings” to “how the world needs only five computers” to “what I wore at the annual shareholders meeting.” Chief among them is the chief himself: Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO. Titled “Jonathan’s blog”, it is translated into 10 languages and ranks 1,370th among all blogs on Technorati.

…

“The notion of the corporation as an ivory tower has just gone,” said Schwartz.

…

If a customer complains about a Sun product on Schwartz’s blog, “now I know before my competitors,” says Schwartz. When a commentator complained that Sun’s products are too expensive for start-up companies, Schwartz responded — and offered start-ups a new program.

Schwartz and Sun are unusual but not alone. Paul Otellini, Intel’s chief executive, writes a blog, but not for public consumption. Mark Hurd, the chief executive of Hewlett-Packard, doesn’t blog but many HP executives do at www.hp.com/blogs.

Among executive blogs, there’s some venting. Dave Hitz, co-founder and executive vice president of Network Appliance, headlined one of his recent entries “Why NetApp’s Earnings Results Last Quarter Frustrated Me” (http://blogs.netapp.com/dave/).

Alan Meckler, chief executive of Jupitermedia, an Internet media company in Darien, Conn., has used his blog (http://weblogs.jupiter media.com/meckler/) as a sort of therapy. In one entry, he complained about a company that pulled out of a deal years ago. “I’ve been carrying that grudge for years, and when I had a chance to write about it, I did,” said Meckler.

Of course engaging customer in real conversation means that companies have to be more accountable. This forces companies in some uncomfortable positions of having to directly respond to public criticisms.

Of course, once the CEO blogs, he must blog when the company faces a public problem. Live and die by the blogging sword.

And that’s what happened in October to Richard Edelman, president and chief executive of Edelman, the public relations firm, and a blog expert. In his own blog he wrote about his firm’s work with Wal-Mart and bloggers.

When a fake blog (known as a flog) promoting Wal-Mart was exposed, Edelman was called to respond. When he initially said nothing, the blogosphere went crazy.

Finally, he posted. Took some blame, announced ethics initiatives, endured the slings and arrows. And moved on.

My take: He was better for it.

As usual, silicon valley companies are taking the lead in redefining public relations and a lot of other traditional companies have a long way to go in order to catch up. Overall this is a very promising trend for all businesses and all I can say is – Amen.

(the pic is not particularly relevant to the topic but it brought a smile to my face…)

eBay ratings booster

I came across this fascinating piece on Auctionbyte, about how some users are gaming the eBay rating system.

Many eBay users are familiar with sellers who use a low-price/high-shipping strategy to manipulate eBay search results. But less well known is the technique of listing 1-cent eBooks with zero shipping charges. In fact, it would appear at first glance to be a money-losing strategy, since eBay charges a minimum 5-cent listing fee for Stores (and 20 cents for core listings). But sellers employing the strategy offer multiple quantities of the items in each listing.

While sellers legitimately sell digital content on eBay, many of the 1-cent eBook, no-shipping Store listings AuctionBytes examined looked suspect, including the possibility that sellers are in effect creating “feedback farms” – creating multiple User IDs that bid on these listings to quickly build up positive feedback ratings.

One such listing posted on September 20 netted the seller close to 1,000 feedback points in a 4-day period. The item for sale was a 1-cent/no shipping eBook that promised in the headline to make sellers $100/day by selling on eBay. By the evening of September 24, there were 9012 of these eBooks still available for sale through this one listing. (The listing contained photos of scantily clad women for no obvious reason.)

One UK website owner is apparently well aware of the penny eBook strategy and created a page to help users quickly overcome the restrictions eBay places on new accounts. “I know what it’s like when you have just opened your ebay account and have restrictions in place such as not being able to list “buy it now” auctions. To help with this problem I put together this short helper page which will get you 10 positive feedbacks within 100 seconds” (http://www.tradedemon.net/10EbayFeedbacks.php). The page includes links to active penny listings on eBay with instructions to buy 10 1-penny eBooks and leave positive feedback for the seller. “By the time you finish all 10, your feedback should be on 10.”

The article also talks about the struggle between the eBay policy enforcers and people trying to make a buck. Now, I don’t recommend that you do any of the things mentioned in the article, but check it out…Its an interesting case study on how it really hard for a horizontal e-business like eBay, to work effectively in the long tail economy.

Online community numbers

The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School recently came out with a new report titled, “Surveying the Digital Future”. This year’s report had an interesting module looking at on-line communities and social networking. The full report is available for sale but the summary has some interesting pieces of data.

Online communities and offline action — The Digital Future Project found that involvement in online communities leads to offline actions. More than one-fifth of online community members (20.3 percent) take actions offline at least once a year that are related to their online community. (An “online community” is defined as a group that shares thoughts or ideas, or works on common projects, through electronic communication only.)

Social activism – Participation in online communities leads to social activism. Almost twothirds of online community members who participate in social causes through the Internet (64.9 percent) say they are involved in causes that were new to them when they began partic ipating on the Internet. And more than 40 percent (43.7 percent) of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities.

Online communities: daily use — A significant majority of members of online communities (56.6 percent) log into their community at least once a day.

Member interaction — Online communities are online havens for interaction among members; 70.4 percent of online community members say they sometimes or always interact with other members of their community while logged in.

This is fairly interesting set of data, especially the last bit related to member interactions. The 70.4% number mentioned above seems to contradict the 90-9-1 rule proposed by Jacob Nielsen. I followed up with the authors of the Annenberg study to find out an explanation for the significant difference. I got a prompt response back from Michael Suman of UCLA (Thanks Guys, you rock!!).

Seems that the 90-9-1 rule was developed back in the 90s, which is an
eternity ago in terms of the net. Maybe that has something to do with the
discrepancy.

Michael

Not an entirely satisfactory explanation…This is still a pretty big discrepancy. I followed up with Jacob Nielsen to get his take on this and got a prompt and detailed response (Thanks Jacob).

Based on their press release, the Annenberg project was only a survey, meaning that it’s based on what people say, not what they do. This means that responses are highly biased in favor of socially desirable statements: people are likely to self-report much more activity and engagement than they actually exhibit.

Also remember that the same person can be a lurker in many contexts and active in a few. If a simplistic survey question asks whether they participate, then the answer could be a truthful “yes”, even if were “no” for 90% of the contexts.

Going beyond the inherent weaknesses of any survey, this survey has been contacting the same people every year for six years. While this provides the benefit of longitudinal data, it also risks increasing the bias, as people may only stay with the survey if they are interested in the kinds of things that the survey asks about.

Finally, what do they mean by “members of online communities”? Quite likely this only includes the 10% of users who are active, and not the 90% who are lurkers, for any given topic. Certainly, the statement that “43.7 percent of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities” seems to indicate a very narrow slice of society, since most people don’t participate in social activism.

You highlight the finding that “70.4 percent of online community members say they sometimes or always interact with other members of their community.” First, we don’t know whether they in fact do this, because it’s only self-reported responses to a survey, as opposed to empirical observation. Second, we don’t know how *much* people do this, even when they do. Let’s say that “community members” are the 10% non-lurkers. Then it could easily be the case that 9 of these 10 percent very rarely interact, making the last 1 percent of hyper-active users responsible for most of the interaction.

The fact that participation inequality was named in the 1990s is not a reason to disbelieve it. It’s a reason to believe that it’s a fundamental characteristic of human behavior since it has also been found in systems in the 1980s and 2000s, including the current website examples I mentioned in my article. The older an insight is, the more likely it is to be true, because if it were wrong, there would have been time for lots of studies to accumulate contrary evidence. It’s much more likely that the “latest, hot” press release has some methodological flaw if it contradicts a long-established finding.
—
Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D.
Nielsen Norman Group

This is getting interesting…What do you guys think?

10 Minute Mail

10 Minute Mail is a new service for creating temporary email addresses. These addresses can be used for registering on sites that require users to provide an email address. The goal is to to rid users of a lot of unsolicited spam emails. Chris Null from Yahoo! has a review of the service:

Well here’s a brain-dead simple solution to the problem: 10 Minute Mail (Note: Web traffic from this story may be causing the 10 Minute Mail site to crash. If it doesn’t load, try it again later.), which provides, for free, exactly what is promised in the name: An email address that vanishes after 10 minutes. There’s no registration, no verification. Just click over to the site and hit “Get my 10 Minute Mail e-mail address.” You’ll instantly be given an address that ceases to exist after 10 minutes. You can then use this address in filling out web forms or whatnot, and a very simple web-based interface gives you full access to any mail the account receives. You can reply to any messages, but you can’t send mail to an account that hasn’t already emailed you. If you can’t get the job done in 10 minutes, you can reset the timer to 10 minutes at any time. There’s no need to login, no password to remember.

For safe surfing and spam avoidance, I haven’t found a simpler, more elegant solution than 10 Minute Mail. It works flawlessly and couldn’t be easier to use. It’s earned a place in my Favorites folder. Give it a spin and see what you think!

I can see this being useful when you want to register for some event or something but you don’t want to receive any follow on emails…Typically, though, most users (including me) have an email address just for the purpose of registering for services that could send spam emails.

Now, what happens if a site requires users to give a valid email address, as part of their term of service (TOS). Isn’t using 10minutemail generated addresses a violation of such terms? Also all the emails that this service generates are from domain 10minutemail.com…Couldn’t the sites that are asking for user email address just reject emails with 10minutemail.com domain, as part of email validation?

Overall, it just seems like a wrong solution to the problem. The real solution is to punish businesses or service providers that spam their users by signing out or boycotting them. Trying to fake one’s identity to avoid potential spam mail, just does not seem like the right way to address this issue.

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