Status-Q

Thankfully, in recent years, email spam filters have improved at almost the same rate as spammers. I’ve been getting relatively little junk, despite the fact that my mail system gets a very great deal. And I imagine most of us humans now have a pretty good built-in filter for the ones that slip past: messages which claim to be from ‘Kate Smith’ but have an email address of angie99@hotmail.com don’t stay in my inbox for very long, for example.

The big effort by spammers these days has gone up one level – they’re less concerned about getting humans to follow links than they are about getting search engines to do so. Email spam doesn’t help much with your Google juice, and I gather, young reader, that the youth of today doesn’t use email much anyway? So ‘comment spam’, where people try to get a more connected web presence by posting comments on all sorts of blogs and forums which include embedded links to their site, is today’s weapon of choice.

A common example arrived this morning – I wrote an article a while back about the Sony eBook reader and somebody tried to post a comment which seems banal enough: “Nice blog adding this to my twitter now”. The punctuation is somewhat sparse, but I can imagine many would be taken in by such a comment and allow it through – not noticing that the link associated with the name (which would appear on Status-Q), would take you to a commercial site. The rogues no longer try to put compelling advertising or even keywords in the message, they just try to make it inoffensive enough that site owners will allow it to be attached to pages with a relevant theme. It’s highly unlikely a user would click it, but search engines might well follow it and so form some conceptual link between eBooks and the originator’s accursed site.

Another example a couple of days ago said something like, ‘Great post – very useful. The page doesn’t finish loading correctly in Opera 9, though’. I might have been tempted to let this through or waste time investigating, if they hadn’t also tried to post a second comment on another page claiming, in the same format, that it didn’t load correctly in IE8…

This morning’s one, though, was yet one step further removed from the spam of old. It was spam linking to a site about SEO – search engine optimisation. (This is about helping search engines find your site when people do relevant searches, in the same way that advertising is of course about helping people to find your product even when they don’t know they want it yet.) What’s more, this post wasn’t even about SEO, but about books about SEO! A comment, on someone else’s page, pretending to be about twitter, and in fact linking search engines to a page about books about how you can get people who are searching for eBooks to find your site… How many levels of indirection can you get?

Of course, the fact that the author of the post was someone named ‘SEO eBook’ was a bit of a give away…

For some time, when I’ve posted something here, a notification has been put on my Twitter account, and since my Tweets also go to Facebook, it’s been visible there too.

I realised recently that the final stage had stopped working: while my manual tweets get copied to Facebook, the remotely-posted updates weren’t doing it any more – some change in the FB Twitter app, I guess. So I’m now investigating Wordbooker, a WordPress plugin that will post directly from here to FB, and also claims to be able to synchronise some comments between the two systems – let’s see if it works!

Everyone who has a hobby must at some point think, “I wonder if I could make a living doing this?”

The NYT has a great article (and video) about a new opportunity being offered by the growth in wind turbines. Sounds like fun!

For this job, though, you may need a certificate from the Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians. There are some wonderful organisations out there, don’t you think?

I forget who said that the great thing about the mobile phone network was that it had lowered people’s expectations of telephony to the point where internet calls were now feasible…

I couldn’t help thinking of this while looking at the map of the UK’s planned switchover to all-digital TV. When I upgraded my aerial a couple of years ago to allow me to do digital stuff, it made such a difference to my analogue picture that the digital signal, while good, is now definitely inferior. And I have a top-line TV with a high-quality digital tuner, but I am still aware of slight digital artefacts which are more annoying than any analogue noise. Most of our TV-watching is, actually, digital, because we store everything to disk and watch it later, but on the rare occasions when we watch anything live – during Wimbledon, for example – we always prefer the analogue signal. This is because I now have very good reception, but ironically, people at the other extreme – in remote far-flung parts of the country with very poor coverage – will have the opposite problem of not being able to get a digital signal at all.

Often, apparent drops in quality can be explained by Clayton Christensen’s idea of disruptive technology: examples include audiophile hi-fi CD systems being replaced by MP3 players, gigabit ethernet connections proving less popular than wifi, and so forth… The original metric that was used by customers to judge a technology’s value is suddenly replaced by a different one and all those who had striven for constant improvement on one axis suddenly have to change direction. The companies that can move fast are generally the winners.

That’s not really the case for the Digital TV switchover. With classic disruptive technology examples, it’s generally the customer who suddenly realises that he wants something different from technology and is willing to put up with a compromise elsewhere in order to get it. Here, it’s not clear to me that many consumers really want digital TV; this is being driven by the industry, which will make it a much harder sell. And it means that it’s the responsibility of the industry to provision the system appropriately so that customers aren’t let down by ‘progress’.

I’m still keen on the switch to digital, because I know what it will let me do on my hard disk, and I appreciate the value of reclaiming large chunks of the frequency spectrum. For me, these are a higher priority than smooth high-speed motion when watching sports footage. But I can’t help feeling I’m probably in a minority here!

Still, perhaps the great thing about YouTube will prove to be that it lowered our expectations of video to the point where terrestrial digital TV was not too much of a let-down.

While walking Tilly this morning, the word frolicsome – absent from my vocabulary for too long – suddenly occurred to me, out of the blue.

It helps maintain your work/life balance. You don’t have a life and you can’t do any work!

If you’re not very good at checking your RSS feed reader, but understandably can’t bear to miss a post on Status-Q, you could try a service like FeedMyInbox, which takes RSS feeds and send them to you by mail. Seems to work very nicely.

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