Skrentablog

In 1841, William Fox Talbot patented the calotype process, the first negative-positive process, making possible multiple copies [of photographs]. This invention permitted an almost limitless number of prints to be produced from a glass negative. Also, the reduction in exposure time made a true mass market for pornographic pictures possible. The technology was immediately employed to reproduce nude portraits. Paris soon became the centre of this trade. In 1848 only thirteen photography studios existed in Paris; by 1860, there were over 400. Most of them profited by selling illicit pornography to the masses who could now afford it. The pictures were also sold near train stations, by traveling salesmen and women in the streets who hid them under their dresses.
    -- wikipedia

But in search and traffic I think it's not pornographers, but the SEO industry that deserves the credit.

On one hand, the relevance issues introduced by spam sort of define the entire environment that both search and social media exist within. It's not a matter of just bolting a spam filter onto your product once it's done, how to be crap-resistant and be able to greyscale score content across the entire spectrum needs to be core to your software.

Beyond that, however, SEO's often pay more detailed and critical attention to the web industry than most of the industry analysts, who simply eat press releases and comment on them. SEOs are continually probing for weakness and insight into the evolving global online traffic market.

Some SEOs I follow:

SEO by the Sea has been methodically going through the patent filings for Google, Yahoo, Flickr, Ask, Technorati, etc. looking for insight into their ranking and anti-spam methologies. Cool. :-)

SEOmoz has a nice how-to guide for getting links into WikiPedia.

Another gem from SEOmoz: "Every so often, one of our employees will roll into the office and announce, 'I'm going to get on Digg today.'" How do they do that? sock puppets, amazon's mechanical turk, or just plain old linkbait?

I find this stuff hilarious but also insightful. If you're designing social media systems, you should be keeping an eye on the $2B industry that sells links from your site to their clients.

:-)