Category Archives: Blogosphere

How extraordinary!!

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Exhibit A: A HuffPo posting by Deepak Chopra that is clear, concise, uses no twee or mystical language, and makes his point forcefully. And as a bonus, I agree with him 100%.
What next? Humility from Coulter? Insight from LGF? Honesty from the NRO? Nuance from Malkin? We’re living in strange times, ladies and gentlemen….

Baghdad's most often quoted blogger is leaving Iraq

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Riverbend and her family have decided to leave:

It’s difficult to decide which is more frightening- car bombs and militias, or having to leave everything you know and love, to some unspecified place for a future where nothing is certain.

As Juan Cole points out, even leaving is not without risk:

Worse, Iraqis who want to come to the US as refugees seeking asylum often face a catch-22 of being defined as terrorists because they have been victimized. For instance, if a family had a member kidnapped, and payed ransom, and then fled to Jordan and applied to come to the US, their having paid the ransom would be considered a form of material support to terrorism and they would be excluded!

A picture saves me a thousand words

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I was planning to write a long blog piece about how Google, Wikipedia, and eBay have changed how we remember things.Mainline model of class 45 diesel locomotive D49 The Manchester Regiment The tentative title was “Nostalgia really isn’t like it used to be”, and I was going to illustrate the point by explaining how a few minutes remembering what it was like to clean out the ashes from the coal-fired boiler in the kitchen (c.1956) had eventually, and serendipitously, led me to post a successful bid on eBay for a Mainline model of a class 45 diesel locomotive (D49, “The Manchester Regiment”).
But then I saw that xkcd had already captured the essence of the situation, so I don’t have to.

Splogs on the rise

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I’m seeing an increasing number of splog trackbacks. If you blog, you will, of course, know all about blogspam: comments that are injected into your blog by “spam bots” and which contain links to spam targets – usually porn, pharm, gambling, etc. There are many ways to counter this stuff, including comment moderation and spam detection systems like Akismet. (I use Akismet and Bad Behavior on this site.)
But splogs are fairly new. The most common manifestation is a fairly generic-looking WordPress or MovableType blog with a set of sidebar links to spam targets. It’s the blog “articles” that are interesting. A spam bot scans various Popular Blogs, finds a recent article, scrapes some of the text, wraps it in some boilerplate text, and constructs an article on the splog. It then generates a trackback ping to the original blog. The idea is that the owner of the Popular Blog will publish the trackback in the comments section, and that later on the spiders from the search engines will find these trackbacks, note that they come from Popular Blogs, and bump the pagerank for the splog to which they point.
And they work! On a couple of occasions recently, I’ve Googled for a subject about which I’d blogged, and I’ve found hits on splogs, quoting my words and referring back to my blog! It’s a bit weird actually… I find myself wondering if splog links are affecting my pagerank!
Simple moderation doesn’t always catch this, because the trackback looks genuine, and we all want our blog entries to be popular and attract links – don’t we? (Of course the paranoid among us, like Alec, are safe: they simply ignore trackbacks.) Fortunately Akismet seems to be on the case; it’s caught several splog trackbacks here recently. In the meantime, I’ve got into the habit of inspecting all trackbacks to my site. You should, too.