Renegade spam fighter returns to game Digg, YouTube

Almost exactly a year after an intense botnet denial-of-service attack destroyed the renegade Blue Frog anti-spam service, the Israeli programmers are back and you won't believe what they're up to.

Eran Reshef, the Israeli entrepreneur who lost his battle with an organized spam ring (background from Wired and SecurityFocus), has launched Collactive, a venture-backed software service that attempts to game the popular user-driven content sites Digg, Reddit and YouTube.

Collactive is hawking software to "democratize" Web 2.0 sites by giving users point-and-click tools to "access and influence content" but the irony of the aggressive anti-spammer manipulating news sites in search of traffic isn't lost on anyone.

Collactive is using an APB (All Points Bulletin) system to push a group of users to either vote up a Digg submission or rate a YouTube video highly.

The bold promise:

Your story will no longer be a random entry buried in a public forum, but an important item featured on the front page of a popular website.

According to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on Collactive's service, said a non-profit outfit used Collactive in conjunction with a 30,000-strong e-mail list to boost the visibility of a Boston Globe opinion piece about the conflict in Darfur, Sudan.

"The piece was featured in a "most-emailed" box on the newspaper's site; as of yesterday, it was the most popular item for the past week," according to the Journal article.

The company also offers a downloadable Web Assistant that provides a way around rigid registration processes on social news sites.

* Also see this review of the Collactive model and this piece by Matt Hines on the return of Blue Frog.