One of the simplest ways of doing this is to simply scan for identical blog entries, or blogs which focus on specific content. The recipe is simple, and if done right, impossible to detect:

1. Find 2+ blog posts about “chocolate pudding”.
2. Grab a random comment from each post.
3. Post each comment as your own user to each other blog, so that each comment appears entirely new, and genuine.
4. Put your spam URL in URL field.

There you have it. The only thing that could spoil you is if you accidentally grab a random comment that itself is spam from somebody else.

The way to combat this is to start ignoring the content of messages. In email, in blog entries, everywhere. We need to just give up on the whole idea. Instead our spam filters look at individual sites point to in URLs provided by said spammers.

Because you know what? These sites look almost exactly today, the way they looked 5, 10 years ago. They’re identical, because once we’re “there”, we either close the browser or we fall for the trap. It’s incredibly easy to scan for general spammy crap, like “viagra” or “penis enlargement” etc. Basically doing it the way it’s been done all this time so far, but applying it to web sites rather than emails or blog comments.

That’s all I had to say, really.

This is an unexpected turn of events. Apple with its “closed” approach versus Adobe with ITS “closed” approach leading to more openness. Two wrongs do not make one right, you say, and I point at this wonderful, glorious exception of where just precisely that is happening. The very nature of “closed” means you can shut out whoever you want however you want, and Adobe in all of its proprietary glory shuts pretty much everyone except Windows users out (yea, Flash runs horrible on the Mac apparently, it’s a resource hog, and crashes constantly).

And Apple shuts Adobe out. Do you hear my giggles as I wheeze for breath?

It reminds me of MSIE back in the day. It was THE browser. The alternative was Netscape Navigator and it was a disastrous piece of crap where Internet Explorer was a shiny piece of solid gold. So developers ignored everything else. Even when Firefox came around, they continued doing so, at least the short bus folks did. Fuck web standards. Then suddenly, their “dis sait rekirs intrnet exprdorerlolstfu” sites were hurting, badly.

But it took a long while. Banks in Sweden required Internet Explorer up until a mere few years ago. My mother’s stock market site (uh yeah, my mom’s dealing in stock, but that’s another story) even to this day requires Internet Explorer.

Now we have Flash, and we see people doing the same mistake all over again. Especially with the web as it is today, with video content and all that, it’s no wonder people are going for Flash, because Flash is pretty much the only alternative. Well, sort of, anyway. Ah-yep-. If you clicked the link you probably noticed that it said “HTML5″ and if that didn’t mean much to you, let me rephrase:

No Flash.

Actually, I can rephrase that even nicer:

No Proprietary One-Company-To-Rule-Them-All Plugins Required.

Did I mention that HTML5 video is supported by the iPhone?

As a developer, this is the part where you go look at the figures for exactly how many people own an iPhone. And the part where you take a stand on whether the iPad will sell to millions or if it’ll flop over and keel. This is the part where you get the numbers fed to you: 42.5 million.

Forty two point five million iPhones as of Q1 2010. And your cute, bunny-hopping Flash-site? It’s a fucking piece of Lego right now, for those 42.5 million users when they browse on their phone.

“Goodbye The Silver Lining. Our culture is formed by the sharing of ideas. Throughout history, for millennia, every piece of art, music, literature and entertainment has been the result of a worldwide collaboration. It’s been an astonishing act of creative evolution, the most vibrant and extraordinary gene pool of imagination and inspiration, from which all were free to draw and create. It has been exceptional, and in the last 50 to 100 years it has come to an end.

The tragedy of the abuse and misuse of intellectual property and copyright cannot be counted. After centuries of sharing, we have allowed a “MINE!” tag to be affixed to every thought, string of notes, doodle on a page, or merest whim. We have committed a grotesque cultural suicide. And the extent to which this has reached should be a parody. We have now allowed ourselves to be in the situation where art museums ban sketching – something that should surely make anyone whose understanding of art history goes beyond yesterday scream in fear. And it exists in our world of gaming in a similarly berserk form. And so it is that Activision has closed down work on not-for-profit fan creation The Silver Lining.“

Very similar to what I said recently, but worded a thousand times better.

In any case, check if out if you’re curious. I’ll continue writing here as well, obviously, so there’s no need to take a crash course in Japanese in order to continue enjoying my deep, philosophical enlightenment. I wrote that with a straight face, by the way.

Those of you who do understand Japanese, I’ll gladly take any comments you have on errors in the language, but please don’t get too nitpicky on me. I’ll lose my will to write if I get 15-page essays about everything I did wrong every time I post a new entry if you do.

And thus, a meme. Make a post on your blog listing up to 5 sites or services that amuse you/intrigue you/help you the most at the moment. This list (at least for me) always changes, as I tend to discover new things, or grow bored with old ones.

Or as in the case with dictionary.com … I had enough of the god damn ads. It’s as if they added a new banner or “text-ad” once a month for the last year. I used their dictionary service very very satisfied for I can’t count how many years (from before my Skotos days), but now my faithful “di” keyword in Firefox went from dictionary.com over to dict.org, which is quite ad-free, thank-you-for-asking.

So my list of 5, backwards because I’m hip that way:

5. dict.org — a free dictionary, and by free I mean very free, as in free of ads and stuff

4. smart.fm — I have been lagging behind recently, because I’m nearing closure on my kanji studies and that’s taking up most of my spare time, but this is a cute site for hammering Japanese (or whatever language it is you wish to study) vocab into one’s brain.

3. gmail — boring, I know, but gmail is actually sort of new to me. I went with POP3 for the longest time, but when my move to Japan started drawing near, I realized that it was just stupidity not to stop with the POP.

2. VISA exchange rates page — call it a blessing, call it a curse, but at least it tells the truth. Most of the time*. Oh and yes, this is above gmail. That says something about my economic situation, I’d say.

1. Zero Punctuation — this guy makes my day. Totally. He reviews games (PC, console, etc) and as the title suggests, he speaks very very fast and very angrily, most of the time. You’ve gotta see it to understand. Even if you don’t know any of the games on the list, just check one out anyway.

Now your turn. I’m not asking you to do this to make me feel all gooey about having started a meme, I’m asking you to do this because I’m honestly curious about what the people I know are entertaining themselves with that I have yet to discover. Call me a greedy bastard.

*) Once about a month ago I went there and saw that the yen had dropped like a rock in the ocean. It had happened overnight, and it was a matter of something like a 30% difference in “price” for me right there. So I scampered off and withdrew money, and when I got home, the amount withdrawn was not at all matching up with this new, glorious number. Turns out the Visa site screwed up somehow, because the day after it was all back to “normal”.

There is the ever present concern of forgetting that the public is there and that things you say can be used against you. Corporations google employee hopefuls and find their blogs and decide that they don’t want people “of that character” in their companies, and I’m sure there are many other variations of the “the private in the public” becoming a tangible problem. Some argue that people are willingly putting their entire lives out there for anyone interested, while others argue that privacy is a growing concern that mustn’t be taken lightly.

Be that as it may, I grew quite fond of blogging and even set up a blog on my own domain name fairly quickly after I got into it. I enjoyed writing without a real purpose, and I enjoyed reading what others wrote. Time limited my presence in the blogosphere (I can’t say that word with a straight face, though, but give me a few years) but for the most part, I found myself spending quite a bit of time reading what others had to say.

February 28th, 2006, I wrote a response to an article on Chicago Tribune (story long since removed) in which the author declared blogs a “dying concept”. They didn’t get it either, though their web site has, in the left menu, a link to “blogs” so I reckon they’ve changed their minds in the 2½ years that have passed since. In their defense, I believe they were looking at blogs from a pure business perspective, though I think their declaration has failed there as well (no figures to back that statement, so don’t quote me on that one).

The point of blogs that I saw back then is pretty similar to how I see it now. I still think of blogs as a way to express what you wouldn’t normally be able to express, more in-depth than you would normally be able to be without getting long-winded and boring in the eyes of those around you (after all, with blogs they can simply stop reading when they feel like it, but with letters or in discussions, they don’t have that option without being at least a bit rude).

Conclusively, I’d like to see some of you people write again. Those of you who haven’t blogged in months, and who think noone’s wondering how you’re doing. I am, sincerely wondering (Erwin, you there and alive still? ). I may not comment on a lot of you people’s posts, but I read them, and I am happy to hear from you, even if it’s as “unpersonal” as by passively reading your blogs.