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Mindless

I am a computer programmer by day and philosopher by night. I post once or twice a week. I aim to prevent blogging from taking to much time, while allowing time to develop each idea before posting it. Each has some reference to human, universal, or societal truths, while presented in an organized, understandable & consise way -- this is the plan anyway. Results may very as what rings true for one may seem false to another. Also becuase sometimes I get things wrong.

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Dealing with Spam comments & who owns your Internet?


In the last month or two I've noticed an increase in spam comments on my blog. I've continued to delete them, but today I thought maybe I should do something to stop them. I looked at my options in blogger and decided the easiest thing to do would be to turn on word verification.

I clicked the box to turn it on and hit save... and then I had another thought. Why don't I just leave the spam comments there? Would you rather have to enter word verification to enter a comment or skip over a few comments that are obvious spam. I'd rather deal with spam then the word verification. I often seem to have trouble reading the letters myself. So I turned the word verification back off.

I've in the mindset of "I won't let the spammers win." the whole time. My irritation kept me trying to win. I am thinking the battle wasn't really worth fighting to begin with.

Any thoughts?

My other thought for the day is that Google and Yahoo are becoming the Microsoft & Apple of the Internet. Most of the services I use on the internet are owned by one of these two:

Owned by Google
Google (the search engine)
blogger.com
gmail
Google groups
Google news
Google reader
Google maps
youtube
Google video

It is pretty obvious for most of these that they are owned by Google they generally say so up front if not in the name.

Owned by Yahoo
yahoo messenger
yahoo groups
del.icio.us (aka delicious)
Flickr

Not owned by either
Skype - owned by Ebay
AOL Instant Messenger - owned by Time Warner (via AOL)
Technorati (not sure who owns it, independent?)
planet.ubuntu.com (owned by Canonical or perhaps the Ubuntu Foundation)


From this list it appears that about half of the web services I use belong to google, one quarter belong to Yahoo and another quarter belong to other companies. Of course other people will use other services from folks like Apple/AOL/Microsoft etc; so this list isn't really representative of what is out there. But a small number of companies own most of the services we use (maybe a dozen or so?) and that is the point. A little scary, don't you think?