spam

  • "...your visitor will have a limited amount of time (specified by you) to fill in the form and send it. And if a spammer tries to post information to your form processor remotely they’re going to hit a big fat roadblock."
  • "...you can create a honeypot form field that should be left blank and then use CSS to hide it from human users, but not bots." Pure CSS bot thwarting.
  • Matt Cutts: "...we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content." Nice to see Google responding to the recent flood of criticism.
  • "...dozens of new URL-shortening services are allowing spammers to evade anti-spam tools that aim at Web domains known for sending spam. The services also inadvertently help spammers trick Internet users who would normally be wary of domain names like, say, Spammy.ru." Irksome.
  • Finding an acceptable "default deny" method for weblog participation. The most exciting developments in the weblog world right now are happening around OpenID. [via waxy]
    filed under: weblogs, identity, spam
  • Photographs of every advertisement in Times Square. [via kottke]
    filed under: marketing, media, visualization, photography

rel=nofollow

I added rel=nofollow to my comment links. More info at Six Log: Support for nofollow.

Update: John Batelle weighs in on nofollow
My gut take on this yesterday was "We're making a decision without thinking through the implications." My second gut take was "We can't possibly imagine all the implications." So my third gut take is "Don't do it if we can't imagine what consequences it might have."
I think John's reaction assumes that the big search engines are the only "processors of our collective reality," and that any change in how they operate represents a major change in our collective reality. I think the nofollow tag puts more control of search engines into the hands of content-controllers. (eg. hosted weblog services, ISPs, etc.) This means there's less control for people who contribute content, but don't own and control their own web space. I'm not sure how I feel about the implications of that (not good right now), but I also know that comment spam is a serious problem and something needed to be done before all discussion stopped.