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November 11, 2003
Juxtaposition
I dunno about all youse (pronounced "ewes") guys (generic, not necessarily male) / bloggers out there but I don't pay much attention to the order of items on the blog. They just sort of pour out (or trickle out sometimes) in any old order. Some are done in advance (e.g. most jokes and quizzes), some are done in retrospect (e.g. the article was drafted for yesterday but unfinished so I back post it to yesterday) but pretty much you take it as it comes. The hardest ones (where I get an idea but don't have time to formalise it) tend to sit in a tab on my browser for a few days (or until I restart the browser) in the hopes that I will get more inspiration.
In this case, the inspiration stems from two posts in succession over at Dusting My Brain (I think I need a vacuum cleaner, not a quick dust). The first post (actually the second from the writers perspective) is about comment spammers and the second (or first) is about being mugged.
Now I don't want to make light of the mugging (which must be a terrible experience) but the placement of the two articles together seemed to be somehow appropriate. For people who pay for their bandwidth in particular, the recent blog comment spam has been a sort of mugging. Personally I think such idiots are interrupting the conversations that I am having with my friends (and readers?). My long term solution will be to migrate archive articles off the main blog onto an MT blog where I can block the comments but that won't help with more recent articles.
From another perspective it is interesting to consider how hostile we bloggers (bloggites? Bloggermaniacs?) are to the comment spammers and yet we accept that these muggings are possible - not that we approve but we know they exist. I wonder if we could funnel all the outrage about SPAM into something which ultimately is more important?
[Ed: Yes I know it is a major heresy for a geek to suggest that anything other than the internet could be important but don't forget that I can remember when the Internet wasn't. Back in the days of UUCP and AARnet. We had email and news but both were dodgy and there was no WWW. That means, unlike the newcomers, I can visualise life without the net :-)]
Posted by Ozguru at November 11, 2003 12:11 PM
