Categories
Apple Blog In The News Politics

Bloggers get ready

There’s going to be a lot of backlash at the blogging community in general thanks to this sicko (Joseph Edward Duncan pretty much detailing his sickness). Just wait until the backlash starts and we get some screwball senator who proposes to require all websites to be registered with law enforcement (the same thing the US has attacked China about).

I’m predicting in the next 18 months, things are going to get rather ugly for bloggers legally. As with any technology a few things will happen:

  1. Someone will find a way to profit – that already happened. There’s a bulk of commercial blogs by CEO’s, companies, media with no other purpose than to gain cheap brand exposure by littering the blogosphere.
  2. Someone will find a way to abuse – that’s already happened. From terrorists (who you can bet have used the medium), to criminals, etc.
  3. Someone will try to legally nullify it, or sue it – that’s about where we stand. Apple started, and it’s going to just escalate. Don’t be surprised if blogspot gets sued by the family or someone else as a result. As if they personally read all of the millions of posts.

Things will get ugly. Don’t forget the whole Patriot Act debate going on. This is right in there. It’s going to get ugly.

Please rel=”nofolllow” links like the above… lets not promote their google rank like many of the ignorant media outlets do.

Categories
Blog Google Internet

No more Spam!

Google, MSN, and Yahoo… plus a ton of blog developers sat down and came up with a fix. And there talking about rapid rollout on this one. Google Blog has the details.

Basically you need to have your blogging product of choice ad

<a href="URL" rel="nofollow">LINK</a>

to any link a visitor can add themselves (trackback, comments, etc). That will tell the search engines not to boost their rank based upon the linking. As a result spamming weblogs will serve no purpose. There will no longer be a page rank increase.

I’ve already hacked WordPress to cover part of this. It won’t do within comment fields, but will do so when you enter a website into the URL field when filing a comment.

Sorry spammers, the world decided: GO AWAY. We don’t like you, never have, never will. Your a bunch of “businesses” with unethical business plans (I have business in quotes since most aren’t even businesses, they are just people trying to scam someone out of some cash).

Thanks to:

Google, Yahoo, MSN, LiveJournal, Scripting News, Six Apart (MovableType), Blogger, WordPress, Flickr, Buzznet, blojsom, Blosxom .

It’s good to see widespread coordination.

Now what about email spam? When will they come up with a DomainKeys, SPF, solution.