Tag Archives: spam

A spam attempt gem

I have been getting a few very enjoyable spam attempts on the blog of late. While the filter captures the usual Russian porn dross, from time to time comments slip through the filter and it falls to me to moderate them. This little gem appeared on a two year old post about wandering the streets of Newtown with my (then) five year-old son looking at the annual “Art on the Streets” displays in shop windows.

Gratitude for posting this posting. I’m decidedly frustrated with struggling to researching out pertinent and intelligent commentary on this issue. Everybody today goes to the very far extremes to either drive household their viewpoint that possibly: everyone else in the planet is wrong, or two that everyone but them does not really understand the situation. Many regards for your concise, pertinent insight.

Touched though I may be to have my insights described as concise (rarely) and pertinent (perhaps), this comment is going into the spam bucket. I will not be giving this particular spammer any free traffic to their website.

Blog Comment Spam

What with buying a new house, going on holiday and now trying to sell the old house, it has been a while since my last post. Here is a quick reflection on blog comment spam to ease myself back into my blogging regimen.

Those who have never written a blog may not be aware of the phenomenon of blog comment spam. The basic idea is the same as email spam: to drive traffic to websites featuring pornography, viagra or worse. Fortunately, spam filtering software works as well, if not better, for blog comment spam as it does for email spam.

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Spam and Social Networks

Social networks have been growing at an extraordinary rate over the last couple of years. The big contest has been between Facebook and MySpace and recently Facebook was reported to have caught up with its older rival. These two social networking giants aim to be walled gardens where users can chat, exchange photos, share music, take quizzes and (more bizarrely) turn each other into virtual vampires.

A more minimalist approach is the microblog. Twitter pioneered the idea of the microblog, asking its users the question “what are you doing”, a question to be answered in 140 characters or less. You are also able to “follow” other twitter users, tracking their posts (or “tweets”) and they may choose to follow you back. Twitter has been growing rapidly over the last year (see chart below) and recently exceeded two million registered users and countless other sites are now following hot on their heels, including jaiku, pownce, identi.ca and kwippy.

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