blogging: May 2008 Archives
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Since I run several sites that deal with domains and the internet industry in general I seem to have been targetted by TodayNic's comment and forum spammers. Over the past year or so I've had to remove multiple spam comment attacks from several sites.
It's annoying. Very annoying.
However it's even more annoying when they have the gall to demand that I remove a post I made last year about their spam.
Considering they're still spamming from what I've seen in the last few weeks I can think of no good reason to remove any posts where I've referred to Todaynic's spam.
Someone claiming to be "Chris" from Todaynic left a comment on another one of my blogs at around 3am this morning.
Image by Irish Typepad via Flickr
Enterprise Ireland seem to be funding a Template Monster clone, which is linked into Digiweb. Why should tax payers be paying for another Eoin Costello project? If it's commercially viable shouldn't it be able to stand on its own two feet? And does the world really need another template monster?
Why would anyone in their right mind pay that kind of money for a such a horrific "design" when so many free site building tools would do as good a job if not better?
Ammado are a very odd business. Judging by what people have been saying this morning it looks like they spammed quite a few bloggers this morning (Justin Mason, Donncha O Caoimh and Damien Mulley that I know of). I have an account with them, so while I thought the email looked dodgy I wasn't going to complain to them formally.
Twitter has been down more than up over the last few days. If anyone wants an invite to jaiku I have a few.. If you want to see what people are blathering about check out Twit.ie (love the name!) which pulls in the latest posts from both jaiku and twitter from an ever growing list of Irish based users.
UPDATE: Justin has blogged about Ammado and also points out that they're signed up to Habeas!
UPDATE 2: Someone from Ammado has posted an "apology" in the comments on Justin's blog. I'm beginning to see a pattern emerging here..
UPDATE 3 - Looks like quite a few people weren't that impressed with being "targetted" by Ammado: Alexia, Maman Poulet, Damien,
Xkcd's latest cartoon pretty much sums up how I feel about a lot of this social media rubbish that you keep reading about.
Although the prize for most offensively described event has to go to IT@Cork with their idiotic description of an event to "increase an organisation's IQ"!
Talk about marketing speak gone insane!
Although the prize for most offensively described event has to go to IT@Cork with their idiotic description of an event to "increase an organisation's IQ"!
Talk about marketing speak gone insane!
Image by N'ayez pas peur!! La Fabrique de Blogs via Flickr
The concept behind Zemanta is intriguing. It's a browser plugin that integrates with serveral of the more popular blogging platforms via your browser. Once you've composed a blog post of 300 characters or more it will make suggestions for images, links and other content.
As they describe it themselves:
The images are pulled from a variety of sources, but they assure users that they are all copyright cleared ie. you won't be getting any nastygrams from people's legal teams asking you to remove them!
Have your browser understand what you are blogging about and suggest pictures, links, articles and tags to make your posts more vibrant. We are making blogging fun again.
Although the people at Zemanta only officially support Firefox I'm working away quite happily using the plugin on Swiftweasel, which is a derivative.
While I've always found the official Google blogs to be good sources of information they lacked interaction as comments were disabled.
They've now changed their policy and are accepting relevant comments
From what I've been able to work out they haven't enabled comments on all their blogs as yet and Google staff don't seem to be engaging with the public. So it seems like it's a bit of a one way street. (If someone can find me evidence to the contrary I would appreciate it)
Of course not all blogs accept comments and for some people there is a very good reason why they don't. Seth Godin, for example, provides a clear explanation on his policy and it makes sense. But if you do allow comments, shouldn't you at least reply to them?
They've now changed their policy and are accepting relevant comments
From what I've been able to work out they haven't enabled comments on all their blogs as yet and Google staff don't seem to be engaging with the public. So it seems like it's a bit of a one way street. (If someone can find me evidence to the contrary I would appreciate it)
Of course not all blogs accept comments and for some people there is a very good reason why they don't. Seth Godin, for example, provides a clear explanation on his policy and it makes sense. But if you do allow comments, shouldn't you at least reply to them?
