Daily Bytes

It's been 2 years since I started blogging. And this time I didn't have to cheat in order to pretend I remembered :-)

Anne van Kesteren has a nice description of the perfect weblog system:

The perfect weblog system
If I'm ever going to write a weblog, or someone else is going to write one I'm going to use, here is an outline of what it should (or must) have. Inspiration comes from an article of Henri Sivonen: Outlining the Ultimate Blogging Server and various people: Asbjørn Ulsberg, Mark Wubben and Robbert Broersma. I was going to use a definition list, but dropped that option in favor of the unordered list, since that seems to be used for this kind of things. I hope your screen is wide enough.

I liked this idea the most:

People who comment should be allowed to edit their comments one time within ten minutes, based on a cookie. Their original comment should be stored and a diff may be made available to the user (optional).

I feel I must be the only person geek that didn't know Ben Goodger had a Firefox Development blog since January 2003.

Just a few thoughts on how to fight comment spamming... First of all a few pointers on the subject:

• Dive into Mark [Weblog Spam]
• Blam! - Blacklist Manager
• Comment spammers redux
• Spam meets blogs
• When the Spam hits the Blogs
  

So, what are the motivations behind comment spammers?

• Posting millions of links in the web will statistically  make lots of them be clicked in the long run. This is the same motivation e-mail spammers have.
• Blogs, due to their nature, give a major contribution to Google Pagerank. Having lots of blogs pointing to the spammers webpage makes their Page Rank and their visit number rise.

So, How can we stop them? There are three ways of stopping or controlling spam.

• Not letting them post or making it harder for them to post.
• Letting them post but then removing their comments from your blog.
• Making it less actractive.
  

Not letting them post:

• IP throttling - Spammers can easily get a 300000 blog list and comment in each one of them a a time making it hard to use this technic.
  
• Black-listing words - This might help solving the problem. I know they can write S E X, or even s3x, instead of sex, but no one looks for that word in Google. If we were talking about spam e-mail it would be a different story.
  
• Black-listing IPs - Doesn't seem to really solve anything as if someone can change IP easily that someone are the spammers.
  
• Black-listing open proxies - I don't think this would solve anything. The only thing it would accomplish would be to annoy a couple blog users.
  
• Mass Black-listing - That's what the blam project is all about. If you have several blogs working together they can do IP throttling much more efficiently.
  
• Comment reviewing - Manually review every comment. 100% efficience but try receiving 20000 comments in one hour.
• Bayesian filters - Might be a nice idea.
• Disabling comments - Try to comment on my blog now ...
• Robot detection - Detecting if the poster is a robot or a real human using technics like image analysis.
• Honey pots - Fake posts used to maintain black-lists
  

Removing Comments:

• Mass comment deletion and comment search by keyword and date - This would help where the other methods fail.
  

Making it pay less:

• Redirecting all urls through a special page making the links not count towards Page Rank.

Bottomline: There isn't a magic solution that will solve comment spamming one and for all but implementing a wide range of solutions might help controling the problem.

Some nice reviews and opinions about blog.com:

• DeLaranja
• Karlus (in portuguese)
• If-Then-Else 
• Topku (in chinese?)
• Keso (in chinese?)
• Público - Computadores (major Portuguese newspaper)
• The English Manager
• Reflective Surface
• DotCafé (in portuguese)
• JornalismoPortoNet (in portuguese)

Finally my pet project for the last few months is online. It's still in beta testing and with registration by invite only but things are looking smooth and features are beeing added all the time.

Feast your eyes ...

Yes, I'm the guilty part for this, and that's the reason I'm not posting so regularly. Not because it's impossible to use the editor but because I'm running late on a lot of stuff.

And in my browser it looks even worse :-)

A nice survey on weblogs:

Perseus - The Blogging Iceberg The most dramatic finding was that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned. Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months). A surprising 132,000 blogs were abandoned after being maintained a year or more (the oldest abandoned blog surveyed had been maintained for 923 days).

I normally don't post about weblogs I find, specially if they are in Portuguese. But this one really deserves a post. A weblog about child adoption, by someone that walked the path, and wants to help others to follow her footsteps. This is what weblogs are all about.

Eu adoptei Passo agora a escrever um pouco sobre as minhas vivências. Se a ideia de ter um filho, dia após dia, ano após ano, continuar a ser sentida e desejada como algo de bom, apesar das duvidas e dos porquês, inerentes ao facto do não nascimento de um filho “biológico”, e continuarem a achar que vale a pena, então é porque vale mesmo a pena.