Five years ago I retired, washed my hair a few times, even got around to – finally! – dusting all my books. Then I came here and, in complete ignorance, choose a blog name that is also the title of a Woody Allen movie – thereby condemning myself forevermore to also-ran status on the search engines.
But here, I found something wonderful. I found a vibrant, interesting and often very funny community of people who care enough to speak up and to stand up for what they believe. I found men and women of all ages and backgrounds. I found you – and your blogs. And I followed you. I found bloggers producing literature, bloggers who could write for The New Yorker, bloggers who make me laugh, bloggers who taught me, bloggers who made me mad but from whom I learned to listen. Really listen.
Thank you.
Once before I noted my own anniversary and included the first post at Whatever Works. Here it is again:
For non-bloggers: A look behind the curtain
Lessons in spam: How [not] to Sound Like A Person:
Same with blogs – Aksimet on WordPress does a fine job for
Whatever Works. (It’s blocked almost 14,000 spam comments from making it through, but does hold them for review, just in case.)
Robo spammers (see above) have been working at creating auto generated and specific ‘comments’ based on the content of a post. Sometimes they’re even successful, but not often. Sheer awfulness still reigns supreme. It’s a Beta world so far.
But that could change. I notice lately that the language is a bit sharper, the comment itself more relevant, almost believable.
The goal for now is commercial, to encourage a blogger to click through. Which means of course that the goal is to deceive.
I do wonder about future implications for us all when deception is run by software, is automated, targeted and widespread.
12 Comments
Posted in blogging, Blogsphere
Tagged blogging, comment spam, spam, Wordpress