It’s old news for the big bloggers, but for me its somewhat novel- the sheer volume of spam comments to my blog is growing at an amazing pace. You don’t see the spam in my comments because I both use Akismet (the spam filter for WordPress 2.x blogs) and moderate all comments. But here is what I have observed on this very blog you are reading right now:

• Total spam comments between July 2005 and January 1, 2006: approximately 50
• Spam comments from January 2006 to May 7: approximately 1500
• Spam comments from May 7 to today: approximately 1700
• Spam comments from January to Yesterday (five months) that made it past Akismet and that I had to manually moderate: about 70
• Spam comments today that made it past Akismet and that I had to manually moderate: 25

I think I sense a trend here…and its not a happy one. I’m up in the 100 spam comments a day range now, and its not unreasonable to expect 200 a day by the end of the year. I wonder if the law of diminishing returns will start to kick in for the services generating the comments?

What I’m describing is an old story on the Internet…wasting other people’s time and money is far too easy. I’m kind of hopeful that the fact that bloggers and makers of blog software like WordPress have learned from what happened with email, and the filters will clamp down more effectively on the junk early in the process. Akismet works pretty well, and if every blogger/blog tool has something similar up and running now or within the next couple of months that might be a good start. If that were to happen,
perhaps the questionable business model upon which blog spamming is based would simply dry up and blow away in the wind.

Yeah, I’m being optimistic- but I can hope, can’t I?

UPDATE: I may be optimistic, but I’m not stupid. I have installed Bad Behavior (to block spam attempts before they even create a comment) and BBStats (to show Bad Behavior’s activity)

I spent a few minutes the other day following a series of threads about a disagreement between a website designer and a “famous” blogger. In summary: a guy paid for someone to re-design their website. Some people criticized the design, and the guy who paid said “anything that’s wrong here is my fault”. Someone sent him a
of a different way the site could have been done, and he posted it saying “there are some good ideas here, I think we might use some”. Then the designer resigned, and some people went ballistic.

Firstly, none of us really know what went on behind the scenes between the designer and their employer. Maybe he said nasty things to her, or used all sorts of double-edged compliments. To be honest, I don’t care much about the specific incident. What I do care about is the discussion regarding the relationship between a designer (any designer, whether for a website or for a house) and the client.

Good designers have artistic vision: the client pays them to use their talent to create something better than the client alone might be able to. However, it is the client who lives with the result…and it is the client who pays the bills. So, in any client - designer relationship, in my opinion, the designer must always accept the will of the client. I don’t care how “artistic” a design might be, if it isn’t fully and entirely comfortable for the client, the designer must willingly make changes until it is.

If the designer builds something to suit themselves and just wants the client to be a bag of money to fund the effort, then they aren’t a designer- they are an artist. Or at least they think they are. Sometimes they will find a client who says “build whatever you want, I trust your vision, here’s a big bag of money”. To me, that client is either a moron, or an artistic patron- they aren’t asking for something to be created that is “for them” or “theirs”, they are asking for the designer to have fun and spend their money. That’s great, but you better get that in writing at the outset.

In reality, if you are an artist, the only way to truly remain “independent” and “fully in control” of your vision is to pay for your own work. If someone is paying you money, you really are beholden to them- what they want takes precedence even if it flies in the face of your “vision”. If you don’t like that, you walk away with a smile on your face and your artistic integrity intact…and your pockets slightly more empty.

I remember watching a home design program on TV years ago. There was a husband and wife team, and they showed all these somewhat (to me) far out home designs. During the show they were interviewed, and the topic of the client’s preferences came up. What they said more or less sent chills up and down my spine: paraphrasing, it was something like “Our clients have no input into what we design- if they don’t like the result, they obviously lack taste and shouldn’t have gone for the best to begin with”. The arrogance fairly dripped from the screen as these two prima donnas pranced about pointing out the total lack of flat wall space or how the angled walls and crushed gravel flooring in the living room echoed the shape of the hills outside. If a designer ever acted that way with me, I’d punt them so fast it would make your head spin. Its *my* house (or blog, or what have you), *my* money- your job, Mr. or Mrs. designer, is to hear my desires and apply your artistic skills to realizing it more fully, correctly, and elegantly than I could by myself.

Unfortunately, there are endless examples of ad campaigns that say nothing with great style and cost millions, houses that can’t be lived in and which make their owners uncomfortable at every turn but which win design awards and websites that present elegant vistas that speak of nothing the user cares about. This tells me that there are enough people out there willing to bow to the “designer’s vision” without speaking up for what *they* want (despite being the ones that pay the bills) to convince at least some designers that this is the way it’s meant to be.

When I converted my site to a “for real” blog using Wordpress about a year ago after nearly a decade “pretend” blogging, it was like I’d moved into a nice, upscale neighborhood. The neighbors were friendly and reasonably intelligent, and everyone’s yard was tidy. The rare comments to my site were reasonably intelligent, and were obviously written by real people who were actual visitors.

Now the new, evil side of the blogosphere has moved in. My site is receiving a hundred or so spam comments a week. They are just like spam emails- only sometimes even more stupid. It really started in earnest in the January time-frame, and thank goodness a new version of Wordpress came along at about that time with an anti-spam feature. Akismet is the name of that feature, and its caught 1,250 spam comments since I activated it about three months ago.

About a week ago, something new (for me, at least) happened. I noticed several new sites linking to mine. When I went to check them out, I discovered they were meaningless template sites with no original content of their own. They had large excerpts of my postings with author taglines implying the site “owner” had written the content. The one redeeming feature was that each such posting had a link to my site.

Those sites have since disappeared (at least I can’t find them any more- the incoming links seem to have gone away)- maybe my content wasn’t working out for them But it does make me a bit uncomfortable. I mean, I don’t write my posts to line someone else’s pocket…heck, I don’t line my pocket with my posts. My words are my words- warts and all- and I’d prefer them only to exist on my site. Link to me- sure! Excerpt a sentence or two? Fantastic! But add your own comments and make the blog “universe” grow, not shrink.

None of what I’m experiencing with my blog is in any way “new”. Other bloggers who’ve been officially blogging for a while longer have been experiencing blog spam and content theft for a long time- its just new to me because I’ve only become a target recently. And it doesn’t really surprise me at all- its part of the wild west Internet. But it is a bit sad…

Update: After writing this post, I did some googling and came across Jonathan Bailey’s site- Plagiarism Today. It has a ton of information, tips, and reports of real-world experiences with content theft and “site scraping”. Shortly after I found this site, Jonathan himself posted a comment here- he must keep an eagle-eye on the Technorati keyword lists or something

Ecto is a great “off line” blog post editor, and I strongly recommend it for anyone who posts a lot to one of the types of blogs it supports.  Version 2 of Ecto for Windows was just released recently.

Anyway, on my particular machine I’m running Windows XP X64, and Ecto 2 is having some problems with the 64 bit version of Windows.  Basically, the problem I’m experiencing appears to be related to an interaction between the eSellerate registration drivers and Windows XP X64.  Alex Hung, the Ecto for Windows “guy”, has been diligently trying to fix the problem, and I’ve chipped in by trying out different versions of the code and such.

All of this is leading up to what has to be my favorite error message of all time.  For some strange reason, probably totally unrelated to the “real” problems I’m experiencing with 64 bit Windows and Ecto, I ended up with a blog posting showing up in Ecto that wasn’t in my blog.  It was stubbornly sticking around- I refreshed several times, and still this test post was there.  Finally, I decided to click on the delete button and get rid of this “phantom” post.  Here’s the error message Ecto
generated:

Yep, strange and annoying is right

UPDATE:  Alex Hung tells me that the text of the error I’ve described here actually comes from WordPress, and Ecto just “passes it on” in the dialog box.  But its still funny