These are my web picks for July 2nd through August 4th:
- YouTube – iPhone4 vs HTC Evo – A brilliantly funny conversation of a typical iPhone customer with a mobile salesman. “I don’t care” what the HTC does “I want an iPhone” even if its a brick!
- Google Me social networking rumour is “very real” – Reckons rival Facebook’s ex CTO | TechEye – Google to start a facebook rival, it makes a lot of sense, but will it work? Google could have a second mover advantage and take heed of facebook’s mistakes. But will people use it? I don’t know. I don’t really want the hassle of maintaining 2 social networks, social networks have come and gone before, but is Facebook just too big to take down?`
- YouTube – Mark Webber Parliament Square F1 Pit Stop w/ Red Bull Racing (Full Version) – I’m not entirely sure the reason for doing this, but why not! Red Bull racing driver Mark Webber make a 6am pit stop outside the Houses of Parliament.
- BBC News – iPhone 4 signal fault leaves Apple ‘stunned’ – An unbelievable story, the fault with the iPhone 4 is that it is normally displaying too many bars, so when you hold it and the bars go right down, actually you were already in a low signal area. <br />
While I am sure that this could be true, surely many people have had other phones and had no signal issues at all! Is this just that the iPhone is an amazing MP3 player, pocket PC, gaming device, etc etc etc but not that good a phone.<br />
Perhaps next year they’ll release an iPhone without the phone! ….. Wait a moment, that’s the iPad.
Comments, Spam and Manners on the Internet
2009 1 Comment Written by Charles Barsley
I’ve been meaning to write a brief post for a while now on comment spam and a comment I received today pushed me over the edge, but more about that in a minute.
Comments – Anyone with a blog loves comment’s, it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling to know that someone is reading your blog and takes the time to make a comment. However 99% of all comments are spam!
Spam comments – What do you classify as a spam comment? You may be surprised to know I get around 100 comments a week on each of my blogs and 99.9% are spam. They range from the blatant examples of spam with a ton of links in the text and lots of random words, right the way through to people / spam bots who just leave a comment “great blog” and then you see their Website link is to a diet pill site.
Every web master has to have their own policy for dealing with comments, for me a comment has to be more than one sentence and has to add something to the post, not just say great post. If it fits these two rules I will probably accept it.
Dealing with Spam – I use two wordpress plugins to deal with Spam, one is Akismet which comes with WordPress as default. I find this is right about 99% of the time at classifying spam. But the other 1 % does worry me, I don’t want to miss a comment from a true commenter, so recently I have installed NoSpamNX which I think is a really cunning tool. If a real human is trying to write a comment, every thing looks exactly the same. But if a spam bot is trying to leave a comment, it will see in the page code an extra text box. If the machine fills this in it will automatically classify the comment as spam, this is really clearing my spam folder,
For me spam is just a minor annoyance but I imagine other people spend hours sifting through it!
Manners on the Internet – So now the reason I wrote this post. There aren’t many Charles Barsley’s in the world but I have found out today there is a relatively famous American with a name somewhat similar to mine. I received two comments today from an American defence attorney. I’m not going to name any names as I don’t know if they are actually connected with the famous person.
They left the comment (which I haven’t approved!)
Keep running your mouth about <details removed>. You will step over the line, and I will be there to ensure that you are brought to task, chump.
Firstly this is a defence Attorney leaving this comment, a company, not a 15 year old. There is no need to resort to threats, just leave a polite comment.
Secondly I have never mentioned this person on my site or anything he is involved in!
Thirdly This comment was left on my Welcome to my blog post. Just 30 seconds on my site would show they have nothing to worry about!
I then recieved another comment just 2 minutes later
If this is the <details removed>, then the above message applies. If not…never mind…
Come on – obviously you’ve realised I have nothing to do with this person, have some manners and make an apology, don’t just send another veiled threat!!
Conclusion
Rant over! Sorry, I just really can’t believe that a company would write something like this. If the celebrity individual is paying them for this I think they should pay more attention at how his money is being wasted!