I am not particularly taken aback that my various blogs (i.e., this one and TVFT) attract occasional spam comments, but I am rather bemused that it’s always the same postings that get the comments. In the beginning I would go and erase them, but it’s not as if there’s some vast army of archivists scouring these babies for evidence of past indiscretions, or past discretions, for that matter, so it doesn’t really matter much. It does raise the question of spam in the first place, though. Why do obviously bogus messages from dubious sources with ludicrous misspellings continue to swell the interwebs? The answer is that somewhere there is a small number of people who cannot recognize bogusness, dubiousness and bad spelling, much less combinations of all three, who are the target of these messages. I guess we can presume that it’s the statistical deviation; everybody, except for the statistical deviation, knows a certain thing. The statistical deviation, on the other hand, thinks that a celebrity without spell-checking really wants them to lose weight, earn money and impress the ladies in matters physiological. It’s a funny world we live in. It does seem, though, that spam in general is dying out, or maybe it’s just that spam filters are finally working. Surprisingly, I get my worst spam in the highest volume via my DJ account. Additionally, I get a report every day of the spam that got caught by the filters. That’s my favorite. Who doesn’t appreciate the found poetry of a list of spam subject headers?
Speaking of technology, the NY Times today deferred to Feedly as the Google Reader replacement of choice. I’ve been using the app pretty much since day one of the demise announcement, and I have to admit that I’ve settled into it nicely. Breaking in the new app gave me a chance to update my feeds, which was a good thing, as I had accumulated a lot of barnacles. You don’t really need to aggregate a lot of aggregating sites, for one thing. The whole point of RSS is to eliminate the use of aggregate sites, except for a few that have particular value beyond always alluding to the obvious. BoingBoing falls into this category. Sure, it aggregates, but it also has original material, and as often as not, it points to sites that no one else is pointing to (at least, they’re not pointing to them until BoingBoing does). Part of the problem of an RSS reader is that one does tend to overload it, and unless you’re professionally trawling the internet for some reason or other, you really don’t want more feedage coming in than you can reasonably enjoy. If you find something interesting, in other words, you want to read it, as compared to being so overwhelmed by all your other unread articles that you just keep moving to keep up. As I was coming from a heavy need for material when I was feeding the DJ site with content, I had a lot of baggage to dump when it was just to entertain me. I still add and subtract, of course. Feed management is one of those modern chores that never fails to feel productive even though the end result may be anything but. One does need to keep busy during the off season, though.
I admittedly have not been moving as quickly on the audio of Summer Street as I would like. No particular reason, except my own inertia. Although it really isn’t that easy, especially working in the realization that I am far from professional at it. I listen to so many audios that I have no delusions about my own quality as a performer. Still, it is allowing me that one last go-through, and when it’s done, it will be done. I’m still going to publish this summer, and summer is rapidly approaching. That I’ll be away in June means that I really do have to get off the schneid. This weekend. I promise, I will start putting in the necessary time.
No comments:
Post a Comment