Hans Across The Interwebs

wall of spam by chotda

Last week the New York times posted a story about the poor bloggers who just can’t do anything but blog 24/7. Apparently they never get to sleep in fear of missing a scoop (and traffic/income), they don’t exercise, eat terribly and as a consequence they have heart attacks and die all over the place. A sad state of affairs, so suffice it to say I was glad to hear it is all worth it.

Some things have happened to me recently that caused me to think about another group on the internet that’s even worse off than the bloggers. If such a thing can be contemplated.

Web Spam 101

It all started with my website Wordsy. People can log in there and post stories about books, authors, et cetera. Every so often in the beginning, I’d get some bogus story about Viagra or Free College Papers. The system used for setting up my site (Drupal) makes it easy enough to ‘unpublish’ such a story, but it started happening so often I needed more help. So just to be clear, I’m not talking about regular old ‘one-click, one million emails’-type spam. This is spam posted on websites. As comments or as stories.

So I enlisted the help of Akismet. This is a service, from the creators of WordPress, that filters all stories and all comments for possible spam. When I first set it up, it worked really well and I didn’t see any spam for a while. But now it’s back.

Some of the spam was noticeably being posted by bots. These are actually just computers with smart programs that scour the web for websites to post their links. As a counter measture I installed a so called ‘Captcha‘. A test to find out if someone is actually human before allowing them to post. (On an interesting side note, we’re also helping digitizing the world’s libraries at the same time)

Of course I take my usual recourse: I unpublish the spam and I block the IP. That means that anyone from the internet connection of the spammer can no longer access my site. At first I simply gave them a white empty page. I’ve tried wasting their time by making the site horribly slow. For the past few weeks I’ve been Rick Rolling them: after typing my url, they go directly to a youtube clip of Rick Astley singing ‘never gonna give you up’. It’s all the hype you know.

The Human Tragedy Of Spam

Now here comes the sad part. The spam keeps coming. And because of the Captcha, I know there are actual human beings who are creating accounts, logging into sites and posting spam. This is someone’s job! They are not the Spam Overlords, they are Spam Soldiers.

And this is sad because:

• First of all, a lot of these Spam Soldiers I’m assuming live in developing nations. It’s not the capitalist successes there, that are scouring websites to post little links. It’s poor people who are probably happy to even make a dollar an hour doing this job. They’re the lowest rung on the Internet food chain. They probably don’t like what they’re doing, either. It’s their boss’ bidding.
• But also, they’re not just giving up their dignity by doing this lowly work. They’re giving up much more. As I mark their posts as spam, their IP-addresses get propagated through Akismet and other services. Their Internet addressess become well known. Sites around the world start blocking access. The spam soldiers then see nothing but whiteness. White, unreachable websites, all over the place. No information, no opinions, no nothing.

I hate the spammer overlords and they need to evaporate. But as for the poor spammer minions, I feel bad for them. Though I’m still going to block them.

Web spam - Human Rights Tragedy or Firing Squad Offense? What do you think?

This week’s big story on the web is how bad the standards of reporting are on the web. It’s about the complainers hating on the blogosphere. My Take: Hey Winer and Evans, change your reading habits!

Dave Winer would go so far as to say that the end is near, because journalistic standards are going down the toilet, while blogospheric group behaviour is going rampant. Winer wishes it was 1997 again, when men were men and bloggers were smart and insightful. In an ironic twist of fate, his story is now #1 on tech aggregator Techmeme.

Mark Evans tries to give some sort of explanation for why many blogs are just so bad. The short of it: original content doesn’t drive traffic; original content takes too much time out of bloggers’ schedules.

Sure, there’s some flocking behaviour out there. The not-so-negative explanation could be: bloggers want to be part of the conversation; so you have to jump on the band wagon sometimes. I know that’s part of the reason for me. Evans also mentions this.

I was a professional journalist for years. I understand how important sources are. I like to have original content as much as the next guy. But for me, blogging is different from writing tech stories for CIO-magazine or InfoWorld (The Dutch versions, if you’re wondering). Sometimes a blog post is just a way to start a conversation. And to learn from it, or just to enjoy it. It’s like a discussion in a bar among friends about something we all find interesting.

Now, I do know some people who will ask me to quote my sources during a drunken discussion in bar (annoyingly…). And sometimes that’s appropriate for blog posts too. And you can even add them yourself. For many blogs, the comments are AS important as the original post. But that’s just me. Others have different goals with their blogs. A blog is not a blog is not a blog. And I don’t hear anyone complaining about the reporting standards on the Dogblog or my friend Kingrat’s Pie Night Announcements. Can’t we all just get along, and have fun in Blog-O-Land?

One thing is definitely true: sites like digg.com, techmeme.com, technorati.com and many more have made it increasingly easy to know exactly what’s going on. What the ‘buzz is’ so to speak. Sorry, I forgot, we call them ‘memes’ now.

Now let me get completely defensive here for a moment, if I may. If you think the web is a place just infested with bad writing, bad reporting and sheepish behaviour, well, you probably spend way too much time scouring these meme-sites for interesting stories to write about. It’s probably time to weed out your feed reader. Winer, are you listening? 1997 Isn’t coming back. It’s like my dad used to say about the television: ‘it has an off button you know’.

So tell me: are you sick and tired of the same old stories over and over again?

Get a grip by noeltykay

If you don’t know what this story is about, well, then you probably haven’t read any blogs or tech news sites for the past week.

In short: Apple used the Windows iTunes update software to roll out the Safari update. And here’s the big kicker: the check box to install was on by default. Mind you, nothing would get installed without a user viewing this screen and clicking ‘OK’, but I grant it would have been - well - nicer to have it off by default. But Apple isn’t here to be nice. So there it is.

So off went the blogosphere, and it’s wake the ‘regular tech media’. Or maybe it was the other way around. Or maybe there’s no longer any difference. The Mac Switcher Blog wrote up a list of some of the places where people felt the need to vent their opinions about Apple’s Faux Pas.

I would almost agree with The Angry Drunk, even though I commented on his blog that what he wrote was bullshit. I was just being difficult.

Seriously kids, every time that Apple, or hell Microsoft for that matter, does something that you do not approve of, it’s not the end of the world. Grow up, take a deep breath, and stop your gods awful whining; or, so help me, I’m taking off my belt.

Well, you can’t blame The Drunk too much for his rantings. This is such an annoyingly insignificant story. What made it explode all over the internet like this? Why am even I writing about it?

And then there’s the “Apple hates its customers” versus “Apple really listens to its customers” discussion. Apple is a company that in my view creatively tests the boundaries of product design, software design, and whatever it is they do over there. That necessarily means they’ll get it right some of the time and wrong other times. It seems to me that they actually quite actively improve on their products based on input from their customers.

So when the 10.5.2 update comes out, or Apple TV revision 2 everyone raves about how they did almost everything ‘we wanted’. And when a tick box get placed wrong, everyone’s a-twitter with ‘Apple never listens to us and only looks out for itself’. WTF? People need to get a grip.

Perhaps it’s just been a slow news week. What do you think?

I wanted to tell you about a company called PicApp. It’s been all over the blogoshere, so you may have heard of it. GigaOm wrote:

PicApp, a San Francisco-based company is offering copyright news and stock photos from large photo banks like Getty Images and Corbis for free. The company is likely to announce availability of its public beta service later today.

The photos are displayed in a flash media file and can be embedded on any web page, just like YouTube. PicApp makes money off contextual advertising it embeds in the photos, and in turn shares it with the photo agencies. The new service is a sign of how tough things are in the stock photography business, where new and low cost competitors are emerging thick and fast, and challenging the old dogs like Getty Images.

So I’m thinking: cool, embedding news pictures on my blog sounds like a great feature. I’d wanted to lighten up the blog with some photographic works, so I signed up for the service and wanted to let you know how that went.

1. First of all, there’s a long and involved registration process. Apparently, there’s no sharing of pictures unless you are registered. This seems to be a big difference with YouTube, where you can simply browse all the videos and simply pick the one you want
2. Then, PicApp is not supported by WordPress.org. So you won’t see a picture on this post for that reason. I didn’t find that out until I had registered, and saw PicApp only gave you a script for embedding pictures (WordPress.com doesn’t allow scripts).
3. I have a strong feeling from what I’ve seen on the site and from the embeddable script, PicApp pictures are going to be full of advertising slogans moving around, attracting attention and bothering innocent blog readers.
4. From what I could see, the quality of pictures is not spectacular. Check out flickr Creative Commons Search before you go to PicApp. That should probably work unless it’s very fresh news you’re blogging about.

In conclusion I’d say PicApp has a strong concept but poor implementation. They have seen Flickr, Youtube and the likes bleeding cash so they have focused a lot on revenue. I think that’s a mistake. Their three big problems (Requiring registration, Requiring embeddable scripts and the Advertising Model) are all prohibitive measures, negatively impacting ease of use. They will prevent PicApp from reaching critical mass.

I’m not sure I agree with everything these guys say but this is definitely a great overview of how to get traffic to your site. I could definitely take a page or two from their advice…

The Blogger’s Guide to SEO - by Aaron & Giovanna Wall : SEO Book.com: “The Blogger’s Guide to SEO”

I’m unsubscribing from a whole bunch of RSS feeds. At first I thought they were just costing me too much time, but now I’m also thinking: reading all those blogs makes you think everything’s already been said. Maybe so, but has anyone said it quite like YOU would say it? I don’t think so. So unsubscribe and feel free to be creative in your own right.

If you want to be a blogger, what you need is focus. You need a solid grasp of where you think your opinion matters. What can you write about interestingly?

So it’s a few days later, and I’m still having a hard time. I’ve determined that it’s not lack of opinions, or lack of news input. It’s lack of concentration. You know, a quick opinion is easily formulated. But I want to write stuff that has more depth to it. And for that to work, I need to concentrate - get away from the constant news feeds, podcasts and web-videos. Still working on it.

You know, to be honest, I don’t know how people keep this up. There’s a media explosion going on. Between downloading tv-shows, recording tv-shows and downloading video and audio-podcasts - I always have something to watch or listen to on my media center. Who has time to blog? So here’s the thing: blogging is like losing weight. It’s all about the habits.

Well, I’d love to start a blog. To be a regular blogger. But I just keep doing other stuff. Other stuff than actually writing. Like reading news; like download software. Like getting settled on my Mac (’cause I’m a switcher). Like having opinions and thinking about them, but without writing them down.

So here I go. Weeeeeee.