Given that it seemed an interesting (and one-time) experiment, I left a comment on Tino Buntic’s 2000 Bloggers project page and now have been added to the giant page of photos of the 2000 bloggers (WARNING: The page is (Duh!) graphic heavy!)  Rather than leave the URL for my personal blog, I left the URL for this new blog, partly as an experiment in site traffic.  Being so new, I can get a better view of site-driven traffic… we’ll see.  I don’t really know how many visitors would actually come over here as a result of my picture (the same standard one I use on this blog).  Now, if my picture had been a bit different or strange or weird, perhaps… Anyway, it’s just another part of the ongoing experiment in all these media.

BTW, he says he has not yet his 2000 bloggers, so if you are interested in being included, head on over to his page and leave a comment.  (You just need to have a photo on your blog and have been blogging for a bit.)

Meanwhile, do check out the pictures and see how many people you know… 🙂  It’s also just quite fun to see the wide range of faces and photos.

When you die, what happens to your blog(s)?  What happens to all that writing?  Think about how things have changed… traditional “writers” have always left behind their writings.  On paper, in journals/diaries, in printed books and magazines.  Perhaps out in public view or perhaps in the “box up in the attic”.  However they are stored, the writings survive the death of the writer and then are seen some day by family or perhaps by researchers.  Indeed, historians relish finding old caches of (snail-mail) letters, diaries, unfinished books or poems. Famous (or wealthy) people have bequeathed their “papers” to a library, often at the university they attended.  Families pass down the “family bible” through generations. It’s all part and parcel of how we have accounted for – and preserved – our history as a culture.   Often the historians prize most the “everyday” writings… the letters… the postcards… the brief notes… as they offer a glimpse into a distant era.

Fast forward to today… while we still generate printed books by the millions and while people still do write in paper diaries/journals/etc., so much of our writing has moved online.  Yet let’s think about what happens when you die:

1. Sooner or later, the registration for your domain(s) will expire and people won’t be able to find your material at the regular URL.
2. Likewise, sooner or later your subscription at your hosting provider expires. (whether that is a true hosting provider where you are running your own software or a hosted blogging provider like TypePad)
3. Because of #2, your files are eventually purged from the hosting provider.
4. Your writing disappears… except, perhaps, to maybe live on in the Way Back Machine if your site was included in one of its snapshots.

Now, #1 and #2 might be delayed a bit if you set your subscriptions/registrations to “auto-renew”.  They would keep auto-renewing at least until the credit card they have listed expired. (Which, one might think, might be relatively soon if your bank cancels it.) Perhaps you could tie it to a bank account that might live longer… but the point is that sooner or later it runs out.

What about the “free” blogging sites like Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress.com, etc?  Good question.  Blogs that are created there do seem to stay around for a very long time after they’ve been updated.  But still, you’d have to think that after some (potentially lengthy) period of inactivity, eventually the system admins are going to archive off inactive accounts.  Odds are that some historian 20 years from now won’t see your pages on LiveJournal (if, indeed, LiveJournal is even still around in its current form).

So what does happen?  Do your entries… just… stop?  Does someone else go in and put in a final entry? (as was done for Dave Ross in “Oh Crap. I have Cancer.“)  Who has your username(s) and password(s) to be able to go and do this?  Does someone else pay for your domain name?  Or print it all out?  Do you have instructions for someone?  (Is this a new area to be added to wills?)

Or do you even care?  Are your online writings not worth saving?  Do you want them all to die out with you?

(I got on this train of thought because of recent conversations on FIR and in other places about “what happens to your corporate blog when you leave the company?”  Should it stay up?  Or should it be removed? (as email addresses would be removed for employees who left the company) It just occurred to me that the argument begged the follow-on question raised here.)

If you have not read Michael Seaton’s post “Plagarism hits The Client Side a.k.a. Scott gets caught“, I’d recommend it as a warning for the kind of thing that can happen to any of us.  In it, Michael details the fact that another blogger out there took one of Michael’s posts, made a few minor changes to it and then posted it as the blogger’s own post without any kind of attribution.  Michael noted another post that was a plagarized version of a TechCrunch post, and as you’ll see in the comments, I found that one of the blogger’s other posts was also a duplicate – this time of a post from another blog back in June 2006. 

I didn’t note it on my comment in Michael’s blog, but in the post I found to be a duplicate, the blogger had been rather dumb in that the image (of DropSend usage) that he pulls in is actually pulled from the blog where he copied the text!  I mean, if you are going to steal someone’s content, you might want to put the images up on your server so that it can’t be tracked back to the source!

But seriously, it’s a shame to see this kind of thing.  As noted by Michael, the blogger in question seems to be a senior marketing person at a well known company in Washington, DC.  And here he is posting other people’s content as his own.  Michael has asked for an explanation, but so far there has been no word publicly from the blogger.  (Although I’ll note his blog hasn’t been updated since January 18th, which I think was when Bryper commented on his re-post of Michael’s text and that post suddenly came down.)

Time was that unethical people could do this type of thing… “can I copy your essay?”  But in the age of Google, Technorati and friends, you will eventually be found out.  You may have a good run… maybe even a long run… but eventually you will be discovered.  And guess what, courtesy of both Google’s caches and sites like the WayBackMachine, your content lives forever. So even if you take down the posts, they are still out.  (And of course, people like me can help in that, as I just used “wget” to grab a copy of the blogger’s website.)

There’s a very simple solution of, course, which can be summarized in this:

Write your own <insert-favorite-expletive> content!

Need we say more?

Thanks to spammers, there are definitely some days that I do wonder whether I have the stamina to continue to engage in the “conversation” that is so much a part of social media.  Take today… I get the standard email that someone has submitted a comment to the “Voice of VOIPSA” weblog and I need to moderate it.  So I go and find that just in the last day there are 10 comments awaiting moderation… one of which is real and the other 9 are comment spam.  And not just quick spam but rather these big giant link dumps that I have to scroll down through, hoping that I don’t miss a “real” comment in all scrolling through the crap.  VoV is a WordPress blog, so I do the quick “Mark all as spam” and then find the 1 that isn’t and mark it for approval. 

Now note that this is with the wonderful Akismet Spam protection module installed! In fact, Akismet helpfully tells me that there are 3,108 spam comments that it has caught since I hit “Delete all” just a couple of weeks ago.  It tells me that 18,311 spam comments have been caught since we installed Akismet on the VoV blog sometime back in the fall.

 A quick trip to Akismet’s home page will show you this nice graphic to the right, along with a page with more stats.  Now, of course, they are a vendor of blog comment/trackback spam prevention software, so naturally it is in their interest to show a high number of spam comments. (Just as it is in the interest of anti-virus vendors to talk about how many viruses are out there in the wild.)    But whether or not their stats are indeed accurate and 94% of all comments are spam, I think we can all agree that it’s a problem.  As I wrote earlier, fellow VoIP blogger Alec Saunders wrote back in December about how spammers were outgunning him 275-to-1.   Shel Holtz writes of having to deal with 100+ trackback spam messages each day.  Any search of Technorati or Google for “trackback spam” will show you the many pages and articles that are talking about the issue.  Even black hats are talking about the issue.

And the level of spam is definitely changing the openness and speed of the conversation.  As I noted, Voice of VOIPSA is using both Akismet and moderation.  On TypePad, I’ve implemented CAPTCHAs to reduce automated blog comment spam, and it’s seemed to work okay, although occasionally one gets through.  I’ve also moderated trackbacks… which is fine, but does obviously introduce latency in the conversation and requires more work for me.   Shel Holtz can’t moderate trackbacks on his platform, so he’s turned them off completely:  “Farewell, trackbacks; screw you, spammers“.  He’s not alone as I know of others doing the same. I’ve seen some bloggers turn off comments completely. 

I don’t blame them.  Who has the time to deal with sorting through all the junk?  And if you don’t moderate or somehow deal with the issue, who wants their blog to turn into a pure spam site?  And each time someone turns off trackbacks or comments, the global “conversation” of which we are all a part dies a little bit more.  Even turning on moderation huts the conversation… others don’t see comments quickly and can’t reply to those comments – and it’s more work for the blog author. I submitted a comment to a blog last week and because it said comments were moderated, I knew I wouldn’t see my comment right away, but when it never appeared I contacted the author and found out the comment never showed up in his moderation queue!  It was a software error, apparently, but I had no way to check.  Now, almost a week later, is my comment even still relevant?  Do I really have the time to go post it again?

What’s the solution?  It’s not entirely clear to me.  Part of the solution is obviously back-end tools like Akismet and the other similar services.  Part of it may be the CAPTCHA tools that we use (although that’s really a bit of an arms race against spammers developing tools to overcome the CAPTCHAs… such tools are out there with varying levels of effectiveness).  Part of it may be identity assertion – things like TypeKey or OpenID (although note that there is nothing preventing spammers from creating OpenIDs).  Part of it may involve a retreat into gated “communities”, i.e. you have to register and be approved by the blog author before commenting (some sites do this now) or be added to the authors known and trusted “friends” list.  I could, if I chose, do this on my LiveJournal blog right now and restrict comments to only my LiveJournal “friends”.

But each one of those solutions throw up barriers and potentially diminish the openness of the conversation.  What about the comments from random readers that sometimes can lead you to other very interesting topics?  (Or might simply make your day in their praise?)  If everyone must be registered or moderated, how “real-time” can the conversation be? (unless it is within the walls of trusted users?)

Will spam kill the “conversation” of social media just as that medium emerges so strongly?  Or will we find the ways or create the tools to allow the conversation to continue?

UPDATE: Okay, so maybe I was just too impatient. The blog is now listed.  I was just surprised that it took several days for it to appear.

I’ve generally been a big fan of Technorati and they still are the primary blog search tool I use… but I admit to being a bit puzzled about what’s going on right now, specifically with this blog.  Or more precisely – what is NOT going on with this blog.  For whatever reason, it is not appearing at all in the Technorati blog directory.  If you do a search of the blog directory on the URL, you get:

Huh?

There are blogs, and then there’s whatever you just typed in. If it’s a blog, we don’t know about it. Maybe you made a typo. Or maybe it’s a blog that doesn’t exist. Maybe you don’t exist. (In which case, please ignore this.)

Which, okay, is one of the cuter error messages I’ve seen lately, but doesn’t address the issue.  Given that I’ve launched a good number of different blogs and websites over time, I find this puzzling.  In the past, the pattern has always been one of “start pinging Technorati and typically a couple of hours later you are in the blog directory”.  Given that I started pinging Technorati from this blog, I think, sometime late last week, I don’t think this is a case of me being impatient.  And they must now be getting pings from this blog, considering that:

• The offline editor I’m using, Windows Live Writer, is set to ping Technorati when it publishes a post in this blog.
• TypePad is set to ping Technorati (and other services) when a new post is published in this blog.
• Feedburner’s “PingShot” service is set to ping Technorati whenever a new post appears in the RSS feed.

So one would think that Technorati would be getting the message.  (Incidentally, this is the same way my other blogs are set up.)

So is it something else?  Did the name of this blog trigger some filter and I’m in some anti-spam-blog queue awaiting approval? Very puzzling indeed.  We’ll see… perhaps I am just being impatient.