But a rash of recent incidents suggests that unscrupulous advertisers are capitalizing on user-generated content, and undermining legitimate advertising in the process.

MySpace has had its share of problems lately, especially when it comes to underage kids being roped in by online predators.

And while it seems a bit silly to blame a medium for the problems of those that use it, that hasn't stopped the popular press from pillorying the service or stopped our Congrescritters from trying to come up with boneheaded ways to regulate it.

Now AdRants reports that a porn vendor has come up with a way to redirect MySpace pages to a porn site through some tricky embedded Flash hacks that get around MySpace's restriction on JavaScript. Not nice.

And if that isn't enough, Vitalsecurity.org now reports that adware ne'er-do-well Zango has been using MySpace as a way of distributing its malicious code through teenagers desperate to have "cool" video content on their sites. Unsuspecting MySpace dupes who copy the code to embed the "Myspace Funny Videos" on their pages also enable pop-ups that can then install the adware. Nothing like tricking kids into doing your dirty work.

Even on the legitimate side of advertising, the openness of the user-contributed sites seems like it might be at odds with the revenue-generating possibilities of the sites themselves.

More and more commercial advertisers are uploading commercial content to sites like YouTube (such as a Pirates of the Caribbean 2 trailer. Disney did actually pay for a Pirates campaign, but it's also getting loads of free advertising through the trailers.)

Volkswagen used MySpace to build a site for Helga, a character in its "Unpimp Your Ride" campaign, and Disney created a page for another movie character.

So how's this going to shake out? Time will tell, though MySpace and Photobucket are apparently looking for human smut scanners in order to filter out the objectionable stuff, at least at the uploaded picture level, since automated filters don't seem to do a very good job. We'll likely see more and more restrictions on Rich Media content. But if the sites restrict too much, they're likely to shoot themselves in the proverbial foot.

Is legislation the right way to deal with the challenges of social networking? Click here to read more.

Overall, it's a big problem for "Web 2.0"-ish publishers that want to embrace social networking and user-supplied content.

In typical Catch-22 fashion, you can't have a social networking site without being open to user-contributed content, but the content that gets uploaded might just end up being a problem for the site.

In many ways it's a problem akin to spam, where illegitimate users of an important system threatened to make our most useful online tool—e-mail—useless through abuse. It's going to take the concerted efforts of the online publishing industry to find a solution that balances the needs for openness, advertising revenue, free speech and the business needs of the sites themselves.

These are some of the opening salvos of a much larger war to come. Keep watching.

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