So Where Do I Go From Here?

I haven't written much lately. Well, at least not on this blog. My Tumblr blog on the other hand has been fairly active by comparison. And of course I'm extremely active on on Twitter, somewhat less active on Google Plus, and I keep in touch with my family through Facebook. So where does Blogger fit in? In the past it was a no-brainer to put whatever I wanted on my blog but now there are so many more choices, many of them more convenient and faster than blogging. Twitter is amazing in this respect and Tumblr fills the gap nicely when Twitter falls short. Tumblr even holds its own nicely against Blogger in terms of longer form writing, something I never really did much anyway....

So here I am with my old blog writing a post wondering if it will be my final one.

Although the new revamped interface for Blogger does look cool once you get used to it. Maybe I'll play around with it a bit....

Useful Extensions for Bloggers

CNET has a list of Firefox extensions for blogging. I'm not sure I agree with every extension in their list. I'm not even done reading their list. This post is mostly an excuse for playing around with Scribefire, a blog editor from their list which looks pretty promising. I've never been very happy with the way that Blogger's editor handles images. Scribefire does a better job with images and is always available in Firefox. It looks like a keeper.

Out of Twitter's Dog House

It seems that my account suspension at Twitter was a short one. I can now tweet again. That was pretty fast. When Blogger thought I was a spammer, I had to fill out a captcha form for months. Of course, I could still post. Anyway, it's an interesting thing to keep in mind with this Web 2.0. You are at the mercy of the company which controls the servers you are using. While this means that they can control spammers more easily. It also means that legitimate users are more likely to get hit by the same hand that slaps down the spammers.

With things like Twitter and blogging, this might not be so important but with GMail? A lot of people swear by their email. A ban can hurt a lot more. Worse yet, my phone's address book synchs to GMail's Contacts. A ban would be terrible for someone who depends on their phone.

Ultimately, the issue of ownership will have to be resolved before Web 2.0 applications can trusted for truly critical uses. If I am blogging, tweeting, and doing all the other crap that we do on the web, I'm generating content. It may be crappy content, it may be useless content, but it is my content and if a company can cut off my access to it, then it's not really my content is it?

Google's CAPTCHA Cracked?

Slashdot reports that spammers are now claiming to have cracked Google's CAPTCHA system. This comes after reports that Microsoft's CAPTCHA system has also been cracked. And here I am always needing two or three tries in order to read Blogger's CAPTCHAs. It's a depressing state of affairs. It is now almost easier for spam-bots to send out penis enlargement ads and get rich quick scams than it is for legitimate users send each other pictures of cats....Now that I think about it, no one will ever notice the difference anyway.

Blogger Thinks I'm a Spammer

Here's a new experience. I was editing an article on my blog today when a CAPTCHA appeared at the bottom of the Blogger editing window. It was accompanied by the following explanation:

Your blog requires word verification

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What's a spam blog?) Since you're an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy, and we sincerely apologize for this false positive.

Before we can turn off mandatory word verification on your posts we'll need to have a human review your blog and verify that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review.

Find out more about how Blogger is fighting spam blogs.

It seems Blogger is taking the news that it is being used to create numerous spam blogs seriously. They have even put up a page explaining what they are doing to fight spam blogs. While I've always found CAPTCHAs annoying and even though spammers are learning to defeat CAPTCHAs, you can hardly blame Blogger for trying to fight spam somehow. I for one wish them well.

You May Already Be Under Attack....

Slashdot has an interesting link to an article about the fact that malware authors have been targeting Blogger (which is the blogging engine that powers this blog along with millions of others) heavily. Since Blogger is owned by Google, this means that about 2% of all malware is hosted by Google. There are three big reasons for this:

1. It is easy to automate setting up a blog on Blogger
2. It is easy to set up Blogger to redirect links to another site
3. Blogger is owned by Google so it's blogs are automatically indexed by Google's search engine

As a result malware authors are drawn to Blogger and set up 16,000 malicious web pages every day—Google simply can't flag and delete these pages fast enough. It's an interesting phenomenon that is repeated over and over again. Call it the "Windows Effect"—a computer product or service becomes so popular that it becomes ubiquituous and it will inevitably be targeted and attacked by hackers. Just like Windows in general and Internet Explorer in particular have been (and still are) popular targets for hackers, now it's Google's turn. And it's not just Google either. MySpace and Facebook are also popular malware targets. Congratulations guys, you've been pulled into the same infamous club that Microsoft has been trying to kick and scream its way out of for years.