Maryam and I are at the Northern Voice conference.
Today is “MooseCamp” and Matt Mullenweg (the founder of WordPress) is leading a discussion about comment spam. But, coming into the session he mentioned that he already has 90,000 WordPress.com blogs (including mine). That’s very cool, but I heard yesterday from someone who works with MySpace that they are seeing 220,000 new MySpaces opening up EVERY DAY. Whew!
I also asked when his “pro” features are gonna come up (like the ability to change your design) and he said they are coming soon. He said that his service got popular faster than he expected so that he’s behind.
Regarding the spam, by the way, he says he’s seeing a whole new kind of spam. Social hacking spam. Spam that gets the blogger to think it’s a real comment. For instance, some of the comment spam that WordPress is blocking today from getting on my blog is this one: “Do you provide a blog feed subscription for this blog so I can get it via email?”
He says this is actually fooling quite a few of the bloggers on his system (they mark it as “not spam” even though it is). Why? Cause it isn’t obvious spam.
There’s a whole war going on over getting onto bloggers’ comments. It makes me wonder if Russell Beattie doesn’t have the right idea by getting rid of comments altogether.
Matt designed a whole company to stop spam named Akismet. Matt is freaking brilliant. I love how his system blocks spam.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
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