CogBlogged from ‘October, 2005’

Let’s say you’ve gotten revved up in all the buzz of social software, Web 2.0 (3.7? 10.0?), folksonomy etc… How many of us really have the prowess to sit down and code something like flickr or del.icio.us or facebook?? Well, I just too k a glance, but I would guess Ning is the thing– Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for building and using social applications. Social apps are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people. It looks like Ning provides a platform to build your own specific social app that works like Craigslist, Match, Zagat, Flickr, Facebook, del.icio.us, or Your own take on Hot or Not? And it seems to be incestuously tagged. For example: * This Or That provides one of those silly places to upload two photos and have public votes for [...]

Whew. Due to some malicious activity that wormed its way onto this server, we had to yank it off the network yesterday. Today was spent re-installing the OS, tripping over apache settings, trying to get those *#&$^ obscure perl modules working for some &#*#* old MovableType blogs running here. My regrets to web sites hosed while our Feed2JS was offline. I am really really really really sorry, and can only shrug and say this is reall really really really an impact of my having a technical staff of 1.0 (me) to do all of our web site development… and this gets hampered when some ^#&$$ monkeys around with my servers. Unfortunately, when our server tanks there’s no quick ways to let users know. FYI, the information below would be useful to file away for future catastrophes as it contains alternative Feed2JS mirror site URLs that can be substituted when this [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve gotten riled up by blog comment spam roaches, especially true since SpamKarma is doing a real bang up job of stopping them before they get far into my WordPress site. But wow.’. check out Tom Coates’ PlasticBag post On Cillit Bang and a new low for marketers…, a detailed narrative of tracking down a completely inappropriate comment posting by cleaning product spambloggers to a personal story of Tom’s writing about his long lost father. I never had the stamina or drive or guts to get to the source as Tom has brilliantly done (eventually phoning the perpetrators, and daring them to respond/explain). But his words slice to the heart of my own emotion about “people” who exploit “web 2.0″ – maybe it is the Read/Write/Spam Web? It is more than well worth reading… The fake weblogs that pretend to be real are almost bad [...]

Sign of the times- Just noticed that a new setting available for Blogger hosted blogs you can add a “word verification” or captcha entry field for comments… one of those randomly generated graphics of scrambled letters that a human must enter to add a comment to a blog. This is intended to cut down automated blog spam. At least the Blogger ones are fairly legible- I’ve seen a few where the distortion is so great it reduces the practice to some creative guessing. Maybe there is something similar in work to deal with the exploding number of spamblogs hoisted on Blogger for the sole purpose of their own incestuous spam linking.