Chipping the web – 00001111

Randy‘s State of the Splogosphere, Part IV: “Comment spam is completely out of control”. Agreed. It took more than five months for Akismet to catch my first 10,000 spam comments, but now it has captured another 10,000 in just over a month. Comment spammers can be a lot more sneaky, because unlike email spam, they don’t care if you click on the links. The links are just designed to acquire Google juice.

Assaf offers a maxim for keeping code maintainable: When re-reading, fix where you hesitate.

Doug Karr wants us all to be nice to each other here in the social networking cattle yard. He even provides a “Social Networking Official Bastard” graphic that you can award to offenders.

Music: should it be illegal, or granted its freedom?

Shelley says that Microsoft does not want us to use IE. She points out that Microsoft doesn’t get anything from Internet Explorer. Not revenue, and certainly not a good reputation. Shelley thinks they’re trying to toss people overboard by holding onto their incompatibilities and adding draconian security measures. I think they’re just apathetic, and doing the minimum to save face.

Also from Shelley: “Every spec should be written like it was going to be read by VB developers.” Hmm, let me try one:

See Dick and Jane play tag.
See Dick forget his namespace prefix.
See Jane throw an exception.
Run, Dick, run!

Rebecca Blood and Shelley Batts excerpt news articles that show just how close to the fascist cliff we tread in these dark times. And Shelley, do you really need an answer to your question at the end of this post?

Among Nick Carr’s 2007 predictions, I find number 6 the most likely. Although Rogers Cadenhead thinks Winer’s re-entry will be in a “new” vessel of his own design.

Did I mention that I love TailRank? TDavid thinks its name sounds like a booty ballot. Me, I get associations with other meanings of the word “rank”, but that link-lovin’ sure don’t stink.