E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

More on "Splogs"

"Splog" as a label for spam blogs seems to be taking off. I'm not crazy about it, because I think the challenges and possible solutions of fake-blog spam sites have huge overlap with fake-portal and fake-search-engine link farms. The difference is mostly significant to people who run blog indexing services.

Not to discount their needs or their efforts. J. Scott Johnson, CTO of Feedster, weighs in today with a piece in Online Media Daily. One of his best points: "Can the war on splogs be won? No." In other words, expect to deter and minimize blog spam,not to eliminate it.

For the past few days I've been involved in a small-group discussion of this issue; one participant is a technical staffer from a leading blog search/stats site. He's intrigued by a couple ideas: a flagging system where participation would depend on endorsement by a known "good" flagger; and whitelisting of known "good" sites to defend against some of the many possible poisoning scenarios.

But I don't hear any of the services talking about a distributed, shared, public system for filtering search results. Similar to, as I said before, Razor or Pyzor or DCC in the email-spam world. Maybe it's just not in the cards. Or maybe we just have to build it and convince them that way.

Imagine if there were a public service that you could feed a list of blog URLs and receive back a "cleaned" list that eliminated known spam blogs. With appropriate software support you could use this service to filter comments, regulate referrer spam, receive alerts of domain-jacking among the sites in your blogroll, filter the results of web searches you subscribe to via RSS, and so on. I have some specific implementation ideas that I'll share in a future post -- or maybe even in a proof-of-concept.

Tuesday, September 20th, 2005
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1 comment

Some related posts: Comment Spam Stats • Comment Spam • Spam, del.icio.us spam • Is Akismet broken again? • Akismet anti-comment-spam • Fixing Web Spam • Google blog search
• Comment from Nancy , 19 months later

Thanks

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