mmm, cheese
After blog experiment, Illinois village ‘vanishes’ | The Register. More on the problem with blogging and the “new” media. When you remove the editor and fact checkers from the scene even experienced journalists can make embarrassing errors in judgement. Here Andrew Orlowski chides Dan Gillmor. Dan posted a link to a near dead site while claiming it was a grand experiment for the future. It now appears to look like a case of “dry-labbing” where you never actually do the test. The test in this case would be going to the site and looking at it.
Alas, when we checked into the virtual village, all we could find was some virtual tumbleweed blowing across the square. The last posting at goskokie dot.com had been made on July 31, when ‘Sara’ had written “So this morning I succeeded in spending an hour and a half at a Dunkies without ingesting a single donut.”
I wrote some stuff before about blogs replacing spam email. Someone is always looking to ruin a good thing or maybe it’s unintentional. I can’t even get spam email anymore by trying. I guess the FBI operation is working and Gmail and Yahoo appear to have really good filtering. Now many of the spammers it appears are blogging. Which is better than sending mindless emails. Now we get mindless blog posts, which take up space. Look for blog spambots to start posting soon.
How do we get order out of this chaos?
Blogging has noise, but unlike email spam it has more structured data. What I think is needed, are blogging filters. Can you verify the people using this blog John? I want to block out some of the noise. There are some good posts here. Is there a way you can generate ignore lists or filters for us on the user side? Something that cuts through the clutter, is what I’m thinking here.
This blog is big and getting bigger, so if I can reduce or filter some of the noise out it would be much more readable. The email spam got canned and now the blogs are filling with useless data. I guess this is the son of spam. There’s some good information here, but wading through crap to get at it is a problem. I’d rather have ads on the page than some of these posts I’ve been reading or starting to read. Most email packages should eat the spam for email. This new blog spam can’t be canned very easily. The system is more open than email. Open is good, but abuse isn’t. If there was a filtering system and accountability you could have an unmoderated posting system and let it run itself. Any ideas on this, aside from stopping blogging, which is an option? Does anybody have any ideas on this? It’s kind of crazy to have all these blogs online and not be able to find information quickly when they contain more data than many corporate sites. It’s sort of the opposite of sending a few million emails for a few replies. Now you are looking for a few things in a million blogs. Chances are somebody else is looking for suckers or new targets. We’ve canned the spam, so I guess now we need to bottle some of the noise.
Personally I think developing a blog spam bot is a fascinating concept.
John, I’ll get Jones in research and development on it right away. Can you help develop the BSB?
The blog spam bot or (bsb) could post auto-replies for you that send users to a an advertisers site. Say I get a question from Higgins on a blog about spam and pudding. I have five thousand people interested in pudding already. I put Higgins on my pudding list and the bsb does the rest. The bsb is selling pudding now 24/7 and posting pudding recipes at blogs worldwide. Worthy of a reply? Sure it is. My bsb is selling Higgins pudding. Higgins it turns out is a pudding eater from way back. That’s what he tells the bsb. Now Higgins decides on buying his pudding online, all because my bsb sent him a fast reply about pudding. Now Higgins is happy he got a reply and is sitting around eating his pudding while I made a commission on the pudding sale. Here’s a free pudding recipe for Higgins. Higgins says, mmm..pudding! You can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your spam. I think that this beats sending Higgins 20,000 emails about pudding every month and hoping Higgins likes pudding and responds to my spam emails. Enjoy your pudding meatheads.
Canton Nut Pudding Recipe
Prepare a rich, smooth custard from a scant pint of milk, two eggs and a tablespoon of sugar. When cold, add a pint of whipped cream and a scant cup of preserved ginger syrup; now pour into the freezer, and when half frozen stir in three tablespoons of chopped walnuts and a cup of thinly sliced Canton ginger. Freeze hard and serve in sherbet glasses, pouring over each portion two tablespoons of imported ginger ale.