ReadWriteWeb

Between self-aggrandizing FriendFeeds, bottom-feeding link baiters, and perpetual Twitter spammers, finding cool online friends can be challenging. Michael G. Noll and Ching-man Au Yeung created the SPEAR (SPamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) algorithm in the hopes of separating the social media wheat from the chaff. This morning the two postgraduate students offered their findings to Delicious in a blog post. The project was first evaluated using data sets collected from the popular bookmarking community.