Tag: Blogging

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Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam.

I’ve never understood why people send spam mail or leave spam comments on blog posts (in the same way I don’t understand why people scribble graffiti tags on trains and walls), but I know that for spammers who really take it seriously there is big money to be made. I suppose in that sense, I DO understand why people create spam if there is the opportunity to make money from it… I guess what I don’t understand is how there continues to be constant stream of people who are gullible enough to take action on the messages and, in doing so, continue to generate an income for the spammers.

Let’s face it, the thing that keeps spam propagating and growing (and therefore making it worthwhile for the spammers to keep sending it) is the fact that there are enough gullible, stupid people in the world who keep responding to it.  If we all were much better at identifying and recognising spam as soon as we saw it, then the spammers would eventually go away because the financial incentive to do so would also disappear. Fortunately for them – and unfortunately for the rest of us – human gullibility (or stupidity) will probably ensure them an income for a while yet.

Having said that, the spam filtering in Gmail is pretty darn good. I currently have a few hundred spam messages sitting in my Gmail’s spam folder which have thankfully been identified and filtered before they get to me, so I don’t ever need to see them. They just disappear from the system after 30 days. Thanks to Matt Cutts and his team at Google, Gmail does a great job keeping the spam away. Thanks Matt!

One of things that happens to any blog as it grows is a substantial increase in the amount of spam comments it receives. Most spam comments are just plain annoying, and many are quite laughable, but it’s a good idea to deal with them before they have a chance to be published.  For example, this blog receives many comments that are never published thanks to the powerful Akismet spam filter running on the backend.  This WordPress plugin tracks my spam statistics, and in the two years that this blog has been running on its current server, the Akismet spam filter has trapped almost 11,000 spam comments with an accuracy rate of 99.8%. That’s an awful lot of comments that never see the light of day!

I wanted to share some of the most recent spam comments because they are kind of insidious.  On the surface they look harmless, perhaps even positive. For example…

My brother suggested I would possibly like this blog. He was entirely right. This publish actually made my day. You can not imagine just how a lot time I had spent for this information! Thanks!

A very impressive article. Well prepared. Very motivating!! Set off on to way

Good writing here I really really like the way you write your blogs. I will continue to visit your site in the future to read more great blog posts like this one! This is an awesome post here.

I dont genuinely know what youre talking about here. This cant be the only method to believe about this can it? It seems like you know a whole lot about the subject, so why not explore it much more? Make it much more accessible to every person else who might not agree with you? Youd get a whole lot a lot more men and women behind this if you just stopped making general statements.

Good day very nice website!! Man .. Excellent .. Amazing .. I will bookmark your website and take the feeds also?I am satisfied to seek out so many useful info here within the put up, we want work out extra strategies on this regard, thank you for sharing. . . . . .

An newsworthy speech is couturier comment. I consider that you should indite solon on this matter, it might not be a taboo mortal but generally group are not sufficiency to talk on such topics. To the succeeding.

On the surface it looks like people are leaving positive comments in response to something I’d written. However, aside from the extremely poor grammar, often a reliable indicator of spam, these comments are so generic as to be completely meaningless. By constructing comments in this way, spammers can spray them across thousands of posts on thousands of blogs in the hope that some will get posted. Unsuspecting bloggers, especially newer bloggers who are often keen to receive any sort of comments, sometimes fail to see these comments for what they are. Not surprising really, since the whole point is to trick you into publishing them.

I’m still not really sure what the point of these generic spam comments is. They don’t contain links to click, so they don’t appear to be able to lead you to an outright scam or scheme. They generally aren’t asking for money, or have any real call-to-action. They are just annoying. They gum up the Internet, clutter our email and clog up our blog feeds, but for no apparent purpose.

Let’s all be more vigilant about spam. If you don’t already, using Gmail is a good first step. Installing Akismet on your blog helps a great deal too. But mostly, stay aware of what spam looks like, and never, ever respond to it. Ever.

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Just Not My Type

I’ve been a but sporadic here on the blog lately.  I’ve got all this stuff in my head that I want to write about but to be honest, I guess I just haven’t felt much like the physical act of typing lately.  I’m actually a pretty lousy typist, despite the fact that I’ve tried, seriously tried, to develop a good typing technique over the years.  I’ve had typing lessons, I’ve used computer typing tutor software, and I’ve tried to force myself to use the right touch typing technique.  But all of that, and I still can’t really type all that well.

When I was at school as a student, I actually did a proper typing course.  In fact, I’ll digress for a moment and mention that my school offered something that I’ve not really seen in too many other schools since… every Thursday afternoon we did “activities”.  We all got to choose from a wide range of activities to do for a few hours every Thursday. Some students went off to play sport, running around the basketball field or ripping each others’ heads off playing football.  That was never really my scene.  I was one of those other more nerdy and anti-social children, who pretty much avoided sport wherever I could.

There aren’t all that many things I actually remember about school, but a couple of things stand out.  I remember going off to the AGL gas company in Hurstville where we did cooking lessons on Thursday afternoon.  I thought it was neat, being a 14 year old kid, jumping on a train to go the two stations up the line, finding the big AGL building, and having some other adult besides my regular teacher showing me how to cook a different meal each week.  At the time, learning to cook didn’t quite have the same prestige as being on the football team, but over the long haul I know which one has been most useful!

Back to the typing story… the other memorable Thursday activity (call me weird) was doing a typing class.  I remember being taught by our library assistant, Mrs Sobb.  She was a older lady and boy could she type!  I remember going through all the usual finger training activities – asd, asdf, asd;lk, dad, sad, fad, gad – and so on. I particularly remember that she had a set of large white mens hankerchiefs with long thin ribbons attached to each corner.  She’d tie two ribbons together behind our neck and the other two ribbons were tied to the typewriter (yes, you heard it, typewriter!)  The hankie would then be suspended like a square hammock between the typewriter and our bodies so we couldn’t see the keyboard.  We just had to place our hands on the home row, by feel, and bang out our lines of sad dads.

Anyway, enough wandering down memory lane. Suffice to say, sometimes as much as you try to learn the “right” way to do something it doesn’t always stick. But even as a “bad” typist, I’ve still written a book of 60,000 words, and a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that since I started this blog I’ve probably typed well over 300,000 words here as well.  Add in the other blogs, wikis, emails, discussion forums and various things I’ve written (typed) over the last few years and it’s interesting to consider that someone can be fairly average at something but still produce something relatively worthwhile.

I guess the lesson is that sometimes it’s more important to actually just DO something, rather than worry about doing it perfectly.

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I am not a prostitute

In the past six days I’ve received six emails from various companies asking me if I’d please be so kind as to promote their services, talk about their products or otherwise just mention their wares in a blog post.  This is not a new thing – I’ve been getting more and more of these requests over the past 12 months – but the frequency of them has been increasing to the point where it now sometimes averages one a day.  In a weird sort of way, I guess this is an indication of some level of “success” in the blogosphere.

But to anyone considering asking me to be a schill for your wares, can I save you all some time?  The answer is no. This is a blog, not a brothel.

Look, I’m sure your products and services are fabulous, and I have no doubt that someone, somewhere may be interested in them.  I even kind of admire the fact that you “get” the power of new/social media enough to take the initiative of asking regular people like me to spruik the benefits of your products.  It’s nice that some of you couched it in terms of “take a look at what we do and if you think it’s a good thing, perhaps you can tell people about it”… that’s at least a respectful way of asking for promotional assistance.  But the answer is still no.  If I thought that a blogger was writing about something for any reasons other than their own, I would lose all faith in whatever they had to say, never being sure exactly where the line was between opinion and advertising. I’m used to being lied to in the traditional media, but I expect better from new media.

To that online university offering a 3 year degree program… it sounds like an ok idea, but no, I don’t want to include a link to your site on my site.  Actually, what is it with online universities? – I have had a ton of requests from quite a few of them, all asking me to include a “simple text-based link” to them, many even offering me reasonable cash payments to do so.  The answer is still no.

To that multimedia organisation that is “creating a portal into the soul of humanity by championing the selfless acts of others”… thanks for asking, but no.

To the flashcard company that wanted me to review their product on my blog, no, sorry.  Actually, after looking at what your product and educational philosophy is all about, it’s probably better I don’t write a review for you. Any tool that focuses on creating better ways to do rote learning is not something you want me to review, trust me.

To the other flashcard company who also wanted me to write about their “unique free services” in one of my upcoming posts, thanks but no thanks. Again, I’m less than impressed with services that help me learn better at the lowest end of Blooms taxonomy.

To the childrens’ book online website that was keen for me to write a review of their product in exchange for a 6 month premium subscription… nope.  Thanks for thinking of me, but asking me to blog about your product, and then telling me how much my readers would benefit from it is a less than subtle way of disguising how much you think you might benefit from it. Thanks, but again, no.

And to the commercial blog run by an online school that was interested in me reposting one of their recent posts, because it would “appeal to my readers”, thanks for thinking of us all, but no.  If the content is compelling enough, people will find it without my help.

Like I said, I appreciate being asked (although you can all stop asking! The answer is still no!) and I suppose it’s nice to think that other people might consider this blog to be worthy or influential enough to ask for a bit of free publicity.  If this happens to me, I can only imagine how many of these requests are made to other bloggers with some real influence!

The bottom line is that Betchablog is, and will remain, independent.  I’m not interested in writing about anything other than what I’m interested in writing about. I don’t take money in exchange for opinion. I won’t write about anyone’s product or service unless I want to do it for my own reasons.  I certainly won’t put links into my posts that I’ve been paid to put there.  I’m flattered to be asked, but even thinking about doing it makes me feel dirty.

Image: ‘Soho Street‘