Starting today, every Monday (or when I happen to remember to do it) I’ll survey my vast empire of websites and find something interesting, amusing, or useful (in my estimation) to post here.

Up today: link.toolbot.com, my link-shortening service. It makes what are probably the longest links of any link-shortening service out there. However, it has two features that I haven’t seen elsewhere which I think are kind of neat. I continue to use it myself because of them. They are:

Even if all the recent interest in Django hasn’t stopped other people from trying to create Python web frameworks, I think it has raised the bar for what people decide to unleash on the world.

Enter TurboGears.

Though it’s billed as a “megaframework,” its structure is almost identical to plain ol’ frameworks Subway and Fanery: a stack combining SQLObject, CherryPy, and a templating system (in this case, Kid). TurboGears also adds Ajax support via MochiKit.

It’s installable via setuptools; even if this means you need to install setuptools first, the net effort required is still less than manually installing TurboGears and its four separate framework components. Dependency management is no small thing when you’re combining several pieces that are all evolving rapidly.

Over on the Technorati blog I see that there’s a summit on web spam happening next week. That’s good. Link farms and spam blogs have been driving me batty.

For combatting the phenomenon from inside tools like Technorati, IceRocket, Feedster, Google Blog Search, and so on, I think our best bet may be collaborative reporting similar to the Razor or Pyzor email-spam-reporting networks.

On the model of Craigslist, last month Blogger introduced a “Flag” button at the top of the screen of all Blogspot-hosted blogs, which is on the right track. But nobody except Google has access to that information. A shared reporting system would mean that before I added an alleged blog to my index, or aggregator service, or whatever, I could query that central database to see if that URL had already been flagged as spam by other users.

Whenever I get one of these communiques through eBay I’m always astonished at the amount of extra verbiage. This one takes the cake, though. Only about 1% of the message body is the actual message – the words “it’s taken care of.” Presented below in full, slightly reformatted and munged.

From: 	  member@ebay.com
Subject: 	Re: Question for item #__ - __ __ __
Date: 	September 17, 2005 4:03:09 PM EDT (CA)
To: 	  __@e-scribe.com
Reply-To: 	  __@comcast.net

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eBay sent this message to __ __ (__). 
Your registered name is included to show this message originated
from eBay. 
Learn more:
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eBay sent this message on behalf of an eBay member via My
Messages. Responses sent using email will go to the eBay member
directly and will include your email address. Use the Respond
link below to send your response via My Messages (your email
address will not be included).			
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Important Marketplace Safety Tip:
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Always remember to complete your transaction on eBay -- it's the
safer way to buy. 

Please do not offer to buy or sell this item through this form
without completing the transaction on eBay. If you receive a
response inviting you to transact outside of eBay, you should
decline -- such transactions may be unsafe and are against eBay
policy.

================================================================
Response to Question about Item -- Respond Now
================================================================

Response from __
Item: __ __  (__)
This message was sent while the listing was active.
__ is the seller.
---------------------------------------
it's taken care of

================================================================
Respond to this question in My Messages: 
http://contact.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?M2MContact&item=__&
requested=__&qid=1251585165&redirect=0
================================================================

Item Details
---------------------------------------
Item name:                             __ __ 
Item number:                           __
End date:                              Sep-19-05 15:34:28 PDT

View the item description here:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=__&sspagename
=ADME:L:RTQ:US:1

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emaildate=2005/09/17:13:03:09&emailtype=3&trackId=__

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95125.

Hitachi really made a splash with their “Hard Drive is the New Bling” promotion, or contest, or campaign, or practical joke, or whatever it is. We all had a good laugh and the writers of Engadget swore off the word “bling” forevermore. But the tin-eared marketing pales next to the sheer wrongness underneath.

The pitch wasn’t really about bling at all, or even geek bling. I imagine what it said before Cory Coolhunter in Marketing got hold of it was, “We should tell everybody that the best portable electronic devices use Hitachi microdrives.” I think in the end that will prove to have been briefly true. But microdrives are on the way out. They have no inherent advantages over flash (that I know of), so they only exist at a particular size tier as long as flash memory at that tier is significantly more expensive. This is surely obvious to everyone, except maybe to Hitachi – who don’t seem to make flash memory devices.

Tim Bray recently posted an update on the Massachusetts OpenDocument decision, dissecting some leaked talking points from Microsoft. These expand on the one-liner I quoted in my previous post on the subject. This passage gets right to the heart of it:

The notion that using standardized formats and protocols gets in the way of innovation is twenty-year-old thinking, it was wrong then and its wrong now. I remember perfectly well, back in the Eighties, IBM and Wang and Pr1me and DEC explaining why their proprietary networking stacks were much more innovative and better than this new-fangled least-common-denominator Internetworking thing, and why their proprietary operating systems were more innovative than Unix. (Hey, most of those companies are out of business, aren’t they?)

Journalist and author David Kline, who I know from the Well, has launched a new blog, Blogrevolt, hot on the heels of his new book, blog! (which I’m betting has something to do with blogging). He’s wondering about companies using blogs to solicit ideas for products:

Which companies are already experimenting with “product definition” blogging? What are the results so far, and how are these firms dealing with the potential confidentiality and competitiveness issues that R&D blogging entails?