Rebecca notes a problem with tags that goes beyond spamming, namely people who purposely pollute the public tag-space to be funny, offensive, or to push their own political agenda. I suppose this is a specialized case of spam. I still think this folksonomy idea is very cool, but we'll see how it plays out over time.
Blog: January 2005 Archives
If you've been using the internet long enough you can remember when spam first became a problem for you. While filtering has taken care of nearly all my email spam, I still have the occasional problem of comment spam on the blog.
To combat comment spam, I have used the MT-Blacklist spam filtering plug-in, closed commenting on old entries, banned repeat offenders, and now even started offering TypeKey authentication. These measures have reduced the comment spam problem to background noise.
I have always thought that if spam didn't pay, the slimy people who send it might spend their time on other pursuits, like say bilking the elderly out of their retirement savings. Unfortunately, spam does seem to pay enough to keep them in the game.
Comment spam is slightly different than email spam. With comment spam, the spammer is trying to use a whole stack of internet software to increase their rank in search engines, and thus drive more traffic to their scam web sites.
Today, I was pleasantly surprised to see in my RSS reader, that the MSN search folks were going to support a novel modifier of the A HTML tag, namely <A HREF="LINK" REL="NOFOLLOW">. The idea being that if comment spammers increase their "pagerank" by polluting blog comments, that search engines would ignore those links with the NOFOLLOW attribute set.
It's a very simple idea, which appears to reduce the incentive for comment spammers to bombard blogger web sites. I don't expect them to change their habits overnight, but perhaps they'll move on once comment spamming is deemed less effective.
After reading the MSN search team blog entry, I thought to myself, "I suppose I could make a plug-in to MovableType to automate that." Tonight when I logged in to my MovableType installation I saw the announcement that there is already a new plug-in available.
The cold war between the forces of good and the evil empire of spammers continues. The first presidential candidate who promises to send the spammers to Gitmo gets my vote.
Upgrading to MT 3.14 was relatively painless. Other than a little driver error when I uploaded some files as binary, which should have been ascii, it all went smooth.
Unfortunately, I can't really say the same for enabling TypeKey. This should really have been covered better in the MT Docs.
Fortunately, I found some help.
As of right now, commenting using typekey still seems wonky. I also haven't tried trackbacks yet. I'll figure it out later.
Maybe I should have done a fresh install in a different directory, then manually merged templates.
[Listening to: Saturated - Kasey Chambers]
[Listening to: Saturated - Kasey Chambers]
I'm finally taking the plunge and upgrading to MT 3.xx. Expect instability for a few minutes.
Blog t-shirt.
[Link courtesty of b^2]
I love funny t-shirts. I never buy one, but I like to imagine what it would be like to be the kind of person who might wear one.
[Listening to: Holiday in spain - Counting Crows]
The folksonomy meme just got a little louder. Technorati has added support for tags, like del.icio.us and flickr.
Here is an interesting essay on the topic.
I think it's all good until the spammers show up and you know they will.
Lately, I've been thinking about how to make my blog more compelling. Today, while perusing my del.icio.us inbox I ran into this essay on Building a better blog. I'm not sure about all the advice offered, but the item entitled "Develop an Authentic Voice" captured my attention.
"If you are authentic, honest, and original, you will find readers who care about what you write. And if you write about what you know and what you are passionate about, you can assure that your readers are informed and entertained."
-- Brian Baliey
I want to find a way to more frequently write in an authentic, honest, original and passionate way. It's far too easy for me to hide behind the trivial, dishonest, and obfuscated.
[Listening to: And on a Rainy Night - Shawn Mullins]
Last month someone tried to insult me by calling me a blogger. I found that to be extremely amusing.
Why was the fact that I blog supposed to be insulting? I think it's because bloggers, it is supposed and probably substantiated, that by and large bloggers have a certain kind of network sized egotism that makes them believe that the little bits of text, graphics and audio they publish on the web are of interest to the world.
What can I say; it's both a curse and an awesome responsibility to have such a gigantic ego.
