It’s freaking New Years. A mini disaster has me left at home analyzing my spam logs. And much to my suprise much of my blog spam is affiliated with black hat spammers utilizing back door university programs. See Google trusts .edu links more than say .info or .biz links.

Here’s a great example of what these high tech spammers are doing. They locate unmonitored university resources like this Cornell University Resolver Program. It looks secure enough buts its a charm to setup some high tech spam urls in a jiffy that redirect a few times over.

These university setups are getting pounded in google. Don’t believe me?

Check out these searches:
Cheap Rentals Montana
Cheap Rentals Ohio

These are just a few of the searches I monitor for a client. And they are getting totally spammy in Google. Reason why? Because people are pounding these open ended University protocols and Google is doing nothing to clean this up. Maybe they will now.

Originally posted on January 1, 2007 @ 3:31 am

Matt Mullenweg of PhotoMatt hightlights again the tendency of a lot of companies to put their focus on market share vs profitablity. He references easily one of my favorite articles of the year from the New Yorker. I referenced it earlier when we first began 901am. It’s a great read if you haven’t already picked it up.

Originally posted on December 30, 2006 @ 7:35 pm

After Howard Lindzon jumped on board with video blog Wallstrip everyone assumed this was a great idea. But after shucking 20k a month to hire producers,actors, and people to make his ego feel good. Howard Lindzon could be showing signs of regret or desperation.

Wallstrip’s founder Howard Lindzon had hired Prince Campbell to consult on the project, the once famous blogger who seems to have disappeared after allegations of fraud, and misuse of finances from various past investors, and clients.

Now Lindsay Campbell (of no relation to Prince Campbell) , Howard Lindzon’s host could be on the outs with a big ticket media company quietly looking to snag her. My props to Lindsay if this rumor is true.

I personally can’t think anyone is in their right mind to invest 20k a month into a project that only gets a few thousand viewers. But dumber things have been done.

Dont’ know what Wallstrip is? Don’t worry about it. Just go check out these hot clips of Lindsay doing some Volvo commercials. It’s far more interesting.

Originally posted on December 31, 2006 @ 2:36 am

Well, not really, but one can dream, right? I find Web 2.0 fascinating and so do a lot of other people as well. We’re seeing web services that pushes the way we use the internet and the web browser forward all the time. E-mail and calendars have since long moved online for a large part of the web working crowd, and more is to come.

Could you perhaps move online, totally? A web operating system, wouldn’t that be neat? Just have something to boot up your computer and run a web browser, the rest – applications as well as your files – are stored on a server that runs its own OS. In the web browser, of course. Google’ll do it, right?

Well, my guess is that we’ll have to wait until late next year before we’re even remotely close to this, but still, there are people who are trying, making web based OS applications for your web browser.

I have yet to try one that I would even consider, but don’t take my word for a fact, check them out yourself in the Big WebOS Roundup post over at Frantic Industries. If nothing else, it’ll provide you ten links to check out.

Originally posted on December 29, 2006 @ 11:00 am

Gmail has certainly hit the blogosphere recently, with a lot of noise from users having all their e-mails deleted. It seems it was a fairly isolated event though, with 60 or so users being the case according to Google’s response over at TechCrunch.

Gmail, being the Hotmail of Web 2.0, have had its problems, but since it’s still in beta, and still free, I find it hard to make too much noise really.

And now they want to bury Outlook once and for all, with cupoming POP3 downloading support. That is, you’ll be able to use Gmail as you e-mail program to download POP3 mail accounts to Gmail, just like you do with Outlook. Now that’s a feature I’ve been craving, although I already mimic it with setting up forwards from my POP3 accounts and sending e-mails with them as well through other account settings in Gmail. But actually downloading them is new, and pretty nifty if you ask me. Some users have gotten the opportunity to try this feature out, read about it at Google Operating System.

Now, please Google, for 2007, how about you actually make Gmail, Calendar, Docs & Spreadsheets and Reader to work nicely together, easily browsed and so on? Go from lots of services to left and right, to a truly packaged solution, please. Thank you, and bye-bye Outlook.

Originally posted on December 29, 2006 @ 9:00 am