Earlier today, I ran across a post on Digg that referenced a blog readability test. The idea behind the test is simple. You type in the URL of your blog or site and it tells you the approximate reading level required to understand it. It got me curious about the readibility of this site so…
Tag Archive: Spam
Video: Jason Calacanis on Internet Pollution
A presentation by Jason Calacanis at LeWeb3 earlier this month drew attention the problem of Web “pollution” as a threat to the Internet itself. According to Calacanis, Usenet is an case study on what is currently happening to the Web. In his speech, he stated that Usenet, ten to fifteen years ago, was a very…
Protecting Content by Using Static Pages
In a recent interview on b-l-o-g-g-e-r.com, Dennis de Bernardy commented on the issue of content theft and spam blogs Bernardy, the creator of Semilogic Pro, which is a pack of themes and plugins for WordPress targeted at business users, said that the problem was due to RSS feeds and recommended what many would call drastic…
Update: Trackback/Comment Spam
To offer a quick update on the trackback/comment spam attack I reported on yesterday, the attack is continuing in earnest today but things seem to be much more under control now. reCAPTCHA is still holding the comment spam at bay and I have swapped out Akismet for Defensio in hopes of reducing the number of…
Massive Trackback/Comment Spam Attack
Over the past 96 hours Plagiarism Today, as well as likely other sites, has been the subject of a massive spam attack across a variety of formats and domains. The attack, which appears to have begun sometime on Friday, has been persistent for the past four days. However, at this juncture, it appears that my…
Whois Service Comes Under Fire
Article Updated According to a recent AP article, the Whois service, a series of databases with information about the individuals that register domains, has come under fire from privacy advocates and a new proposal seeks to do away with the service altogether. Such a move would be a tremendous blow to law enforcement, lawyers and…
Autodiscovery and RSS Scraping
Feed autodiscovery is one of the most powerful tools available for encouraging feed usage and subscription. Theoretically at least, by giving browsers and feed readers an easy way to identify the feed and users an intuitive way to subscribe to it, more people will take advantage of it. However, when a reader of this site…
Copyright 2.0 Show – Episode 19 – McTakeDown
It’s Monday again and that means it is time for another 40-minute episode of the Copyright 2.0 show. This week the show is filled to the brim with the usual copyright news, humor and sarcasm that has made the show so special. Also included is a special birthday announcement and my pathetic attempt to rewrite…
A Scrape of a Scrape
I often get asked by reporters and bloggers alike exactly how bad scraping is on the Web. I discuss my past experiments on the topic and how, depending on your keywords, suspicious traffic starts showing up with the first post. However, as I was searching for information on IE7 security flaws for another site I’m…
WordPress and Comment Spam
I would like to take an aside and delve into a related topic that has been on my mind for the past few months: Comment spam. Though it doesn’t have much to do with content theft, I have several reasons for wanting to cover this. First many of the RSS scrapers and spam bloggers also…
This work by Jonathan Bailey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
