phil ringnalda

This morning, Jay prompted me to read an article on weblog comment spam in El Reg. According to it,

Blog spamming is turning nasty. First spotted approximately a year ago, blog spam involves the automated posting of Web address onto weblogs or online discussion boards.

(Added emphasis not even needed, for anyone who’s been around.)

This evening, the Yahoo! News channel on RSS & Blogging prompted me to read an article (which, after some digging, I discovered was published in the awkwardly capitalized eWEEK) by Mary Jo Foley on Microsoft’s new blogging venture. I managed to hold my tongue in cheek check through the absolute lack of information, as the Microsoft nonspokesperson said “nope, dunno when we’ll do it outside Japan, nope, dunno if we’ll charge, nope, dunno if we’re actually hosting, or just doing a content creation tool, nope, dunno how many cheese sandwiches are actually eaten in Japan.” but then I got to the inevitable “everything’s about Microsoft vs. Google” part:

Some industry watchers said they see Microsoft’s move into blogging as a counteroffensive against MSN archrival Google. Earlier this year, Google purchased Pyra Labs, the San Francisco-based vendor behind the Blogger blog-authoring platform.

Right. Step one: hover your mouse over the clock in the corner of your computer screen, the date including the year should pop up. Note the year. Step two: google it.

comment spam. Be a pro, actually scroll through the first page of results, clear down to the bottom, you should find me talking about comment spam in October 2002. Really suck it up, read the post and the comments, and you’ll see that at the time I was calling spamming individual posts just the same old thing that had been around a while already. Either way, retail spamming or wholesale spam bombing, October 2002 is not approximately a year ago.

google pyra. Dead simple, your first result is Dan Gillmor’s post that actually broke the story. February 15, 2003, which was only earlier this year last year.

Does it matter? Well, compare these two things: “starting from scratch to compete with Google’s recent purchase of tiny Pyra Labs” and “starting from scratch to compete with Google’s purchase 18 months ago of market leader Blogger.” Which one leaves you wanting to bet on which horse? In the case of El Reg, the difference is really only whether or not it’s news: if you know that automated comment spam bombs are going on two years old, that anonymous proxy use for comment spamming is nearly that old, and that using nipr.mil proxies for various things that scare people is far, far older, then there’s really no news there: day 632, spammers spam, ISPs ignore, Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead. At least it got MT-Blacklist some well-deserved press.

But what really gores my ox is the awareness that, since every news article I read about something I actually know is completely, utterly, absolutely, factually, wrong, I have to assume that all the ones I read about things I don’t know are just as wrong. Maybe they get eight out of ten facts in the article right. How do I know which eight, or more importantly, which two?