a convenient truth

Apparently Trackbacks are dead. Tom is right, of course - the only surprising thing is how long it took for spammers to find blogs.

I imagine it would be quite possibly to work out the economics of it - at what point is it worth the spammers while to exploit a new mechanism for spamming.

For web-spamming it has to be some function of search engine algorithms, and the number of victims. Search engines (read “google”) like blogs because they update regularly and they all link to each other. Trackbacks and wikis both provide fertile ground for this kind of nonsense.

Any budding economics graduates fancy giving it a whirl? I’m sure there’s a PhD in there somewhere.

Of course, trackbacks aren’t really dead - using the same techniques as for email spam it’s possible to mostly stop it - the problem is that while we are now used to email spam, and we hardly even read it any more, seeing some bozo start defacing your website just so he can peddle his penile-enlargement kit is far more offensive. I think most bloggers are going to stop using trackbacks and comments soon.

Well, all bloggers who use common blogging software. There are advantages to genetic diversity, and I reckon my comments are safe from comment spammers for a good while yet.

topleftpixel has some great photos. This guy is really good at framing his images: this one and this one are particularly good IMO.

Apparently the Italian phrase for “Having your cake and eating it” means “Having your wife drunk, and your barrel still full of wine”. Much better I think.

Great link from Delicious: The Omnivore - Learning to eat everything.

Finally hunted down a silly bug in snurf, which stopped XML-RPC working (allow_dotted_names needs to be true in register_instance, since you asked).

I might post a bit more frequently now the blasted thing is actually working.

It is impossible to finish a jar of Marmite. One can only reduce the quantity of remaining marmite, but there is always enough left for another slice of toast.