You know what would be a really cool name for a blog about comment spam? Yup, Iamspeechless.com (or the other four-word variation Thismakesmespeechless.com). I get dozens of these comment spams a week with just those three words and a bunch of irrelevant links.
I’m really happy that Ozh recommended Akismet.com to me. It’s a comment spam catcher for Wordpress. For the past couple months I’ve been getting more and more comment spam every day — the kind that looks like it was sent by a real person and doesn’t use any of the comment blacklisted words.
Akismet caught 26 for me in the last 24 hours. Zero false positives. If you aren’t using Akismet yet, all you need to do is sign up to Wordpress.com.
After I posted about Philipp Lenssen’s poll of Blogspot blog’s, I thought: the guy who has to come up with a new “Blogs of Note” for Blogger’s dashboard every day must have the most frustrating job in the whole of Google. Half of the blogs he has to survey (and I reckon he must go through hundreds each day) is spam. Poor bastard.
The Spam weblog by Weblogs Inc is looking for people who want to be paid contributors. Their criteria:
Are you passionate about spam, viruses, worms, and all things unsolicited and electronic? Do you keep files of all your spam subject lines so you can create haikus to amuse your friends? Do you wish you could make a little money off your obsessions?
Just send in a couple of samples on the topic (100-400 words).
I’m selling spamerang.net which I’ve had for about four years to cover some unforseen costs that have occured recently. It’s a website that I used to explain an idea for exacting a kind of justice against spammers — by discovering their email addresses and exposing them to spambots (Google cache of spamerang.net).
(Yes, I know that doesn’t work with the most devious spammers, but it does against the regular cottage industry spammers that make up the vast majority of their industry.) Spamerang.net has already achieved a Pagerank of 5 and is listed in Dmoz. So it will be a pretty good start for anyone who wants to create a website about spam or a weblog about spamming and email security.