You definitely bring up some good points here. By nature, I think this site is intended to be sort of spammy. It will be a place where people can post their content at will and tout not only their websites (in numerous locations that make sense), but also their thoughts (and eventually media). I guess it was intentionally designed with the thought that users/clients can control where their content goes, so if they control where it goes, it is on the right page as they see it.
Sure, there will be abusers and I have thought about implementing community driven strategies that allow for removal of that content. Also, I have considered approaches for arranging popular items at the top of the page, or arranging items by date, or expiring the data after a certain timeframe, rate limiting submissions, flagging explicit content, having only trusted clients call the APIs, enabling/disabling links (if you notice, all are disabled currently), etc. I have not settled on one particular approach yet.
With respect to discovery of content, the thought is this would mostly be exploratory based the user’s desires and reliant on the existence of posted content. I can definitely implement some sort of full text searching capability for the site, but that sort of cancels the inherent logical mapping of the content to the indexed host and path. It may be inevitable, however.
Your point is well taken that it may lead to a new specialization of SEO and I wasn’t suggesting that there wouldn’t be some optimization involved. What I was suggesting is that perhaps the site could be useful in eliminating the “industry" of exploiting people’s need for online recognition but their inability to receive it due to lack of technical knowledge (the API makes it quite simple to post content) by giving them control over where content is posted. Anyway, that was the hope.
a. Thanks.
b. The difference between this and Yahoo is people can define the page(s) where they want their content to go, though the API has not yet been exposed.