MediaSavvy

I really like Rafat Ali’s new Digital Media Jobs Blog. It’s an incredibly simple idea with a real revenue potential.

He’s simply blogging digital media jobs, from the usual online classified sources. Finding these jobs in the usual haystacks is nontrivial and the number and quality of his listings is high. This site demonstrates how versatile the blog format can be and that we have only begun to explore its possibilities.

After spending too much time an energy dealing with posting spam, I finally installed MT-Blacklist. I’ve been concerned that it wasn’t going to be effective, but it was becoming clear that the vast majority of the spam in my comments was coming from just a couple of scumbags and that a blacklist was probably the right approach.

Comment spam has become such a nuisance that every time I open my mailbox I could feel the tension and anger rising.

While I don’t have enough experience to say how well it works, it did manage the few test messages I threw at it. It is really well-designed and easy to install and set up. It also allows me to avoid inconveniencing my users by requiring registrations for comments or closing comments after a certain period of time. Finally, it avoids the more radical and time-consuming solution of switching my site from Movable Type.

Belden has released a study that says unique-user counts based on cookies are too high. Can this be news to anyone? I remember having this same conversation with my webmaster (remember webmasters?) back in 1995.

I’ve used cookies to count users on MediaSavvy, but I’ve never told anyone what this number is, or believed it myself.

Underlying dissatisfaction with this crude method of counting users is no doubt one of the many information issues that are driving news sites to user registration. While I’m unenthusiastic about registration as a method of gathering useless demographics, it does help create countable and measurable identities for users.

Yesterday, I wrote that I received an obvious spam comment, apparently from Edmunds.com. Today, I was able to analyze my log files, and the results are explosive.

At the date and time that message 364 was spammed, that message was accessed by a Java program from IP address 66.161.49.254. According to the following IP Address lookup, this address belongs to Automotive.com, a competitor to Edmunds.

Automotive.com also spammed my site on 3/10. Finally, I was spammed via email, apparently by one of their affiliates using a forged return address, eight times in November and December of 2003.

Edmunds general counsel posted a prompt reply to my posting yesterday evening, denying they had anything to do with it. Now that we know who is responsible, I encourage him to take it up with Automotive.com.

Update: Edmunds didn’t spam me. Automotive.com spammed me, using Edmunds name, and I have the log files to prove it. Also see the comment on this message from Edmunds general counsel.

My web site has recently been plagued recently by spammers trying to scam links to sites offering viagra and baldness cures.

Today, I find that someone calling himself Mark Riley has posted a completely irrelevant and gratuitous comment on my site with a link back to edmunds.com. Here is the comment. You decide if it’s anything other than comment spam.

Edmunds.com is a legitimate site and one that I use and like. Are they now using spam to promote themselves? I can see no other explanation for this message. No one other than Edmunds could possibly benefit from it. I’m awaiting Edmunds’ reply.