Refocusing My Blog Objectives

Ouch!

I just looked at my post counts the past few months. They have been positively dismal compared to my historical performance.

When my post counts dip, it’s usually because I’m on the road to far away places (November-December 2005) or insanely busy at my real job, being the Microsoft Pragmatic Evangelist. When my article counts dip below 100 for the month, it’s a sign that something is going on; might be meetings, travel or a show in which I’m assisting.

Of late, it’s been figuring out how to battle the comment spammers and a recent splog incursion. 1,600 rogue comments per day, these days.

Madness. My ‘bot is aggressive (a little too aggressive sometimes); it does the job, though and I need to leave it be.

I’m getting back to my original goals, which include roughly:

• 1/3 original content
• 1/3 referential content (content that is tangential to what I’m working on)
• 1/3 ‘just because’ content (includes whimsy, interesting stories and things of which I don’t want to lose track)

Regular readers will note I run the gamut from technical to whimsical, depending on what I’m up to or thinking about.

Andy Warhol once said "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes" (this is his actual quote from 1968, per Wikipedia). Now that the ‘future’ appears to be here, this 15-minute rule has been adopted and referred to in the pop culture and still seems to apply.

Going out on a limb, I’d propose a corollary (which may, or may not already been made by any number of parties unknown to me):

"Through blogs, everyone will be famous to 15 people"

Of course, as there are superstars in the political and entertainment industries (from which most world famous people originate), there are superstars in the blogosphere who shatter this rule.

I am not one of them.

I have a voice and a blog on which to speak. If my voice resonates with you, I have an audience. If it doesn’t, I still have a blog.

You know: this whole Internet thing may just catch on 😉

An Inconvenient Truth

I had the pleasure (and terror) of watching "An Inconvenient Truth" on a flight the other day.

Frightening, but SEE THIS FILM.

Mr. Gore is very compelling in his presentation, and the facts he states are truly terrifying.

It is unusual for me to be persuaded by a documentary; I tend to view such persuasion as a challenge and broaden my horizons with research. Here are my results of a smattering of searches from my notes on the film:

• SaveBioGems: "Polar Bears on Thin Ice"
• PastPeak: "CO2 Growth ‘Unprecedented’"
• Natural Resources Defense Council: "Consequences of Global Warming"

The icing on the cake is this query of global warming articles on the White House site; lots of talk about research, but almost none about action or solutions.

See the film. Be sure to watch the messages in the credits. Decide for yourself.

Spammers, Splogs, Sportals

You’ve heard me mentioning my comment spammer pests. These are the guys who spam my blog with comment posts containing links to something they’re trying to promote.

Sometimes they add nonsensical text to their posts; "I’m so bored", or kudos; "Good site!", "Great Job!" or "May we exchange links?". All nonsense, attempting to add to the ‘realism’ that it’s an actual comment.

I did some digging into the comment spam ecosystem, of which many blogs (including this one) are an unwilling part. Here are some notes:

• The links they post are intended to improve the search rankings for their product sites, simply by their discovery by search engine spiders who crawl the web.
• Improved rankings for their keywords improve their search result rankings, which means they bubble to the top of search engine results.
• The links themselves typically point to Sportals, massive collections of computer-generated links which themselves link out to advertisers who have paid for the comment spam services.
• If the spammer is the service provider themselves, they are using comment spam to self-promote their products.
• The comment spammers might also be driving traffic to Splogs, computer-generated blogs containing content from articles posted in legitimate blogs. The Wikipedia article to which I point has an interesting discussion about what constitutes a Splog versus a Spam Blog (comments containing links, which sounds more like my problem).

If the search engines are fooled, the spammer’s results bubble to the top. Some number of real users will click on these links, driving traffic to the spam sites. The spam sites host advertisements placed there by Google or MSN, and if the users click on the ad links, the spam site gets paid.

Update: The 14.09 issue of Wired has a nicely-written article on this topic. The article goes into far greater detail and is worth a peek. Note: you may have to search the Wired News Archives for 14.09 and spin through the results.

Voyager 1 reaches 100 AU

An Astronomical Unit (AU) is the distance from the earth to the sun (93 million miles).

In 30 years, Voyager 1 has traveled to a distance of 100 AU from the Sun, farther than any other known man-made object; around 9.3 billion miles from our sun.

The spacecraft cannot rely on solar power anymore; it’s too far out. At this distance, our sun appears merely as a bright point of light. The craft is getting power from nuclear power sources, called radioisotope thermoelectric generators, provided by the US Department of Energy.

In the image to the left, Voyager 1 is now at the outer edge of our solar system, in an area called the heliosheath. This is a place where our sun’s light and gravity wanes. It is approaching interstellar space, traveling at about 1 million miles per day.

In 10 years, Voyager could cross into interstellar space.

Read the JPL story: “Voyager 1: ‘The Spacecraft That Could’ Hits New Milestone”.