Community Guy – Jake McKee

Comments have returned

Apparently I really have won the war. After only 48 hours of having comments turned off, I got the following message in my inbox:

I have to say that I’m impressed. First time a spammer has contacted me and apologized. I even followed up to ask him if he’d be willing to come onto our podcast (I was curious to talk about Transparency – this month’s theme). Unfortunately he (very politely) declined.
While I’m happy with the result, and am taking the optimistic position that it’s for real, I’m still extremely troubled by the larger issue. Globalization and cheaper labor costs are creating many, many new opportunities for both parties involved. Some of these models are fantastic, some not so much. Cool user generated content sites, for instance, would be far fewer if content moderators weren’t outsourced. But when it’s possible to pay nearly nothing to have real humans creating quasi-relevant spam, it becomes even more important for companies to act responsibly and honestly.

links for 2007-05-17

• PvPonline.com – Comic for May 16
  I love the PVP web comic – artist Scott Kurtz is a great guy with mad comic skillz. Yesterday’s strip was one of the best in a while. What happens when you break up with World of Warcraft? Scott fills us in.
  (tags: comics gaming)

links for 2007-05-14

• Microsoft claims software like Linux violates its patents – May 28, 2007
  “We live in a world where we honor, and support the honoring of, intellectual property”… said the CEO of one of the most aggressive businesses in modern history.
  (tags: microsoft opensource)
• Fodors.com > Focus on Photography
  It’s that time again, summer is nearly here and vacations are spinning up. Here’s a number of tips from the Fodor’s folks on taking great vacation photos. So where are you going this year?
  (tags: photography travel vacation)
• Daimler to sell Chrysler to Cerberus for $7.4 billion
  YouTube goes for $1.65 billion, the very old school, large-scale Chrysler gets $7.4 billion. It’s a crazy time we live in.
  (tags: marketing youtube business)

links for 2007-05-13

• Big in Japan: Asterisk+Ruby=
  It’s funny days around our offices…sadly we were laughing to hard to ask if Mike was OK. We’re such bastards.
  (tags: humor)

Lost the battle, won’t lose the war

OK, fine. I’m throwing in the towel, at least temporarily. The manual spammers have won this battle, hopefully they won’t win the war too.

In the last week, I’ve gotten about 100 manual comment spam posts. These are blog comments that are posted by a real person, probably overseas working for a tiny amount of money, that aren’t “spam” in the traditional sense. They actually read the entry then write some sort of quasi-related comment in the hope that you will think it’s a real comment and not delete it. Since they can include a URL as part of their personal info, this helps drive up their Google Juice. When they start applying this practice to the very entry where I called their ethics and morals into question, there’s no hope.

Of course it’s still spam. In fact, it’s actually worse than traditional spam since it’s not as easy to ignore. This means the overall value of the blog conversation is severely hampered.

I suppose we can score one for globalization, but this practice is a significant dark moment for blogging.

Hopefully turning off comments will help them lose interest in this site and I can turn comments back on soon. Here’s hoping….

links for 2007-05-12

• scandalMap – Bush Admin scandals goes interactive
  Interesting Flash visualization of the scandals that the Bush Admin has been involved with. It’s even Web 2.0-compliant… it has tags.
  (tags: politics flash)

Upcoming Movies

I could (and have) spend hours on the Apple movie trailers site. I love trailers – even bad movies look like they’re movie of the year in 30 seconds.

Here’s a few of the movies I’m looking forward to:

• Bourne Ultimatum  (with this one, I have a calendar filled with red X marks counting down to the release date)
• The Lives of Others
• Good Luck Chuck (this will likely suck, but looks funny and has Jessica Alba. Sold.)
• Slow Burn
• Jindabyne
• Day Watch (this looks really odd, but it’s a Fox Searchlight flick, so I’m all over it)
• Sunshine

Now the real question: How to find time to go see movies when crying babies aren’t really welcomed in the theater.

links for 2007-05-11

• 556 Mini-Griptilian
  My Dad bought me a really cool new knife. This thing is razor sharp and REALLY smooth to operate with one hand. Thanks Dad!!
  (tags: tools gadgets)
• Twitter / deltaairlines
  Wow, interesting. Delta Airlines is getting it’s Tweet on. It has a highly personal feel to it. This may actually be a btter solution for companies than blogging – fast, simple, little room for misinterpretation. Hmm.
  (tags: twitter business marketing)
• U.S. losing battle for Muslim hearts and minds
  Wow, here’s one to file in the “Great story, 4 years ago” category. Yikes.
  (tags: politics)

Common Internet Morality?

If you haven’t noticed the rush of comments here on the blog lately, let me apologize on behalf of the spammers. That’s right, despite my image captcha verification I’m still getting comment spam.

How, you ask, can an automated tool figure out the text that’s in the captcha image? They can’t. Instead, these are real people posting nearly understandable comments that are almost relevant to the blog post itself. For example:

Many of the spam comments I’ve gotten lately have required a second look to see if they’re real people or not. (Sorry if I deleted your non-spam comment) Ugh. This comes so close to being something cool – i.e. someone from a company interacting on a blog, sharing their opinion and URL. Unfortunately, it’s nothing more than a scam, made possible by overseas outsourcing and Mechanical Turk.

Annoying as this is to deal with, I suppose it’s the price of doing business on the internet. But it’s lead to me to wonder lately – is there a "common morality" on the internet? If someone in the US was getting paid to manually spam blogs, they’d likely know what they were doing was in a moral gray area. But if you living in India, working as a manual spammer, does the morality of this task change? Do you have the same guilty feelings about what you’re doing that an American (or heck, European) might? My guess is that this isn’t as much about location as it’s about income levels. That said, it’s hard to ignore the fact the amount of spam coming from Eastern Europe (and especially Russia), the amount of pirated software in China, and the levels of shady outsourcing coming from a number of third world countries.

Maybe I’m just pissy that my blog’s getting spammed and short of shutting off commenting all together, there’s nothing I can do to stop it…

links for 2007-05-06

• Little Red Barn on Flickr – Photo Sharing!
  Perhaps the best photo I’ve seen to date on Flickr. Wow.
  (tags: photography flickr)