Zen and the Art of Prop Making

A big problem with a blogs is the huge amount of time wasted dealing with automated comment spam . Their primary purpose is link building for better search engine optimisation and also for generating traffic to generally irrelevant commercial websites. The comment spam content is usually vague and general in nature having little relevance to the posts targeted. Recently the comment spam content has been socially engineered in the hope of increasing the chance of the comment being approved and published in a blog. Much of this type of comment flatters the bloggers writing style or depth of knowledge on *the subject*. It is the bloggers ego that is targeted in these instances. Controlling comment spam The blunt solution for controlling comment spam could be to simply remove the comment option on every post in the blog. Voila! No more spam. While this definitely solves the problem the down side is you sacrifice any reader interaction with the post. Some posts seem to receive far

When searching for information on the Internet you want relevant content in your search results. Usually you get relevant content for your query in the first few pages of results. If the information you seek is more than 6 months old it will be buried beneath tens of millions of irrelevant results because it is deemed not relevant enough to make it to the top of search results. This makes the relevant content you are after virtually impossible to find. Google judges relevant content as content that is updated regularly as opposed to static content. An historical document is static content but it is still relevant content . Static historical content should be just as accessable as regularly updated content and should not be prioritised in importance by companies who control access to this information and have a financial interest in search results. Is this trend what we have to look forward to in the future? It's hardly a satisfactory state of affairs. "What's Hot" v

The rising popularity of automated comment spam software targeting blogs is annoying. The only thing they have to offer is a bit of entertainment in how badly they are written and how natural sounding they try to be. Comment spam promising to bookmark my posts, informing that they will be telling all their friends how informative my posts are and that they will be coming back again soon leaves me breathless with anticipation. Dumber and dumber comment spam I've decided to dedicate a post to comment spam I've received. All comment spam had no relevance whatsoever to the associated post content and all had URL's linking back to commercial sites. I'm sure you will find much of this comment spam familiar. I've rated them on a score of 1-10 within a category for a bit of fun. - You post great articles. Bookmarked ! ( 1/10 for originality) - Pretty nice article. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say that I have really enjoyed browsing your blog pos

Is all the time and effort that we put into blogs really worth the effort? We have an initial surge of literary largesse with their first blogging experience but I wonder how many of the plaintive "Hello world" posts have actually been read by a human? Does anyone ever benefit from blogs ? Considering the sheer volume of information available on the Interent today the vast majority are unlikely to become compulsory reading material. Am I too cynical? I'm probably just tired of looking at the computer screen. Working on a computer has an addictive quality and I can be, as a friend recently pointed out, doggedly obsessive when I'm focussed on a project. Blogs or bogs I personally don't like the word blog. It sounds heavy and cumbersome - a bit of a downer. Blogs conjure up images of swamps and bogs. Uploading information to a blog seems a contradiction of terms. Dump seems more appropriate. Like some primordial tar pit into which things fall and are then preserved