ScreenCastsOnline and MacTV have posted a great screencast that demonstrates some of the wonders of LaunchBar. I’m a longtime fan and user of LaunchBar, but it can be hard to evangelize because it’s so unlike anything most users know. (Spotlight has changed that a bit, but that’s a post unto itself.)

I thought the use of the Keyboard Viewer was particularly clever. When the utility you’re demonstrating has “Keep your hands on the keyboard” as its motto, just following the mouse won’t do.

“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.

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.