One issue that Prentiss has emphasized in the past is the need for adherence to a controlled vocabulary when categorizing information. I’ve wondered whether categories could be an emergent outcome of smushing a lot of data together. Well, perhaps, but we ain’t there yet. The chaos at reversible is evidence of that (which I contributed to with my earlier experiment…sorry). Obviously the option exists to take advantage of a useful hierarchy of categories, but the obligation does not.

Preparatory to the appearance of RSS feeds that all the cool kids will want to link to, I’ve tooled up another CSS button:

reversibleTry Reversible: It’s confusing but fun

Later: Word from Joshua is that this will not duplicate Mark Pilgrim’s cool hack: it just makes it easy to create a sort of ad-hoc directory that points back to whatever pages you want. I haven’t asked him, but I suspect this is really almost a diversion he put together on the trail of something else.

I was checking over my error logs recently, looking for problem pages that should be redirected, and found repeated attempts to load FormMail. Now, I do have a form-to-mail CGI on my web host, but not FormMail. FormMail is by far the most popular of these widgets. I was briefly puzzled by the request to load it: I’ve never had it installed, never had a link to it, so I couldn’t quite figure how it could be a bad link.

Until I read a comment on a story somewhere else mentioning that FormMail had a security flaw that made it available for hijacking by spammers. The flaw has been corrected, but it stands to reason there are lots of old installs of it floating around, ripe for the picking.

I don’t quite get it, but Joshua Schachter’s latest project is reversible. This shows where you’re coming from to reach a certain page, as well as where other people came from to get there. OK, that’s nice, but it’s been done before. This also has some kind of categorization system that I don’t understand. I think the real power will come when he generates customized RSS feeds that people can include in their own pages (if it doesn’t completely swamp his server). That will make everyone as cool as Mark Pilgrim.

Later: Let’s try an experiment: Adam Rice | Adam Rice | Adam Rice.

Got my first case of comment spam today. The commenter purports to the have the URL “http://www.1heluva.com/cgi-bin/join.cgi?refer=23911” and comes from IP number 81.86.245.111 (which has been banned).

Don’t bother going to that URL. It froze my browser, and damn near gave me a seizure with all its blinky scrolly bits.

James Gleick, the science writer, had an article on spam in Sunday’s NY Times. Like Jon Udell, I found it disappointingly superficial — I could say the same about some of Gleick’s other writing.

Spam will be hard to legislate out of existence, mostly because of the Net’s global nature. I already receive a fair amount of Korean, Chinese, and Japanese spam, and a little in German. Perhaps, sooner or later, all these countries will pass legislation with teeth to crack down on spammers, but right now, even the USA doesn’t have any.

I already use Spam Assassin, and recommend it highly. It catches most of my spam, but about ten pieces slip past every day (I’m not sure how much I get, but I believe it’s about 100 pieces/day). My mail client, Apple’s mail.app, catches about half of the rest. We could do better–especially because I probably have a small number of false-positives, which bugs me a bit.

Here’s what I’d like to see:

Better collaborative filtering: mail.app already allows you to flag a message as spam, which refines an internal spam-filtering algorithm. This could be extended by submitting the offending message to a central database, which would then push out updates on a regular basis. Such software once existed on the Mac, called Spam Blaster. It was effective, but it was put out of business by Sound Blaster for infringing its trademark on anything with “Blaster” in the name. I believe that Spam Assassin also uses a small number of people to feed new spam into the system, but it can’t be as effective as a massively collaborative system.

Pay: I’d be happy to see a system put in place where everyone pays, say, $10 into an escrow account. If you try to e-mail me and you aren’t on my whitelist, one penny is deducted from your account (I don’t particularly care where the money goes — give it to your ISP). After I receive your message, adding you to my whitelist would just require pushing a button. This would effectively end spam, as spammers couldn’t or wouldn’t pay a penny for every piece of mail sent out. For individuals, though, it would take a long time to work down that $10–that’s sending e-mail to 1,000 new people.

The latter scheme would require some pretty basic architectural changes in the way e-mail works. But considering the gyrations ISPs and individuals are going to already, it’d be worth it. A bigger problem is that it is somewhat undemocratic and bureaucratic: it assumes that everyone has $10 to spare, and the creation of an escrow system (though the system could probably be funded on the interest of the escrowed money).

The former scheme would be somewhat less effective, but could get up and running quickly. Services like Spamcop are doing this now, but for a fee, and inconvenient if you don’t want an @spamcop,net address. It would be worth it for companies like AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo to run the back-end of a service like this as a free service, simply because they are so relentlessly hammered by spam.

The phrase may be hackneyed, but maybe that’s just because it comes in handy so often. I’ve often said that Austin has been spoiled by its own success.

I wonder if the same thing is happening to Blogger. Let’s be clear: I think Blogger is great. It makes it dead simple — and free — for everyone to start a blog, and in my book, that’s a Good Thing.

The problem is, everyone did, and Blogger has become overwhelmed. People find their archives are evaporating, they’re having trouble posting, etc. I made the switch to Moveable Type a while ago, not because of problems, but because (as I half-jokingly say) my life wasn’t complicated enough. Seriously: I wanted to play around with some of the numerous options that MT offers. A little while ago, Jenny encountered these problems, and so I set her up with a blog inside my own installation of MT. More recently, Dori encountered the same kinds of problems, so I helped her set up her own MT blog (I’m getting good at this). I suspect that the same story has been repeated hundreds of times.

Blogger’s excess of success may be Moveable Type’s success as well. I want Blogger to thrive (I also want it to generate RSS feeds for all its users). I don’t know what needs to happen to keep Blogger running smoothly. The fact that it is free is obviously one of its attractions. You can support it by buying a Blogger Pro subscription, or by buying a Pyrad. Perhaps they need to set up a tip-jar for taking voluntary $5 contributions or something.

This entry at Boingboing recaps (using surprisingly similar language) a comment I sent Greg Elin by e-mail recently. Weird. I’m not accusing anyone of plagiarism — I’m just observing how certain ideas seem to precipitate out of the ether when the building-blocks are in place.

Apparently not — though they did just return, evidently. Ben and Mena Trott, authors of Movable Type (and, apparently, cyborgs who don’t need to sleep) are revving MT again, this time to version 2.6. I’m glad to see them releasing early and often, but a bit chagrined that I just installed 2.51 on a new host. Oh well. I’m guessing the upgrade will be painless enough. There appear to be plenty of tasty features in this release, although the one I’m really looking forward to, user-customizable fields, ain’t there yet. I know it’s on the wishlist, though.

I recently wrote about a new site, GeoURL. In the course of corresponding with that site’s instigator, I also wound up making up the little green badge you see in the obligatory badge zone on this page (and which is appearing in many other blogs, now that GeoURL has been slashdotted).

Some random observations:

There are a lot of interesting things that could be done with GeoURL. First thing that occurred to me is this: create a website where anyone can create a page (sort of like blog meets guestbook?). All they have to do is write up a description of a place in physical reality, give its coordinates, and ping GeoURL. Those places would then show up as links in a GeoURL “neighborhood report.” You could have categories like “park,” “restaurant,” “WiFi hotspot,” etc. Obviously there are problems with this. It would be easy to spam it, so either you’d need an administrator, or you’d need some kind of karma-point voting system (which could also be abused). And some kind of robot-thwarting scheme preventing more than one new entry from a given IP every, say, 10 seconds, and perhaps one of those “distorted graphic” reading tests to sign up. But apart from these implementation problems, this could make interesting things possible. If these categories were part of the tagging for each page, and GeoURL indexed those categories, then one could do a GeoURL search just for restaurants around my neighborhood (for example). This would allow you to bypass Citysearch-type sites with distributed/aggregated tools created directly by regular folks. Hmm. I think many of the tools needed for the front-end of this are probably available already — it’s just a matter of putting them together.

It’s an ego-stroke seeing my little badge being used.

I originally patterned the badge after the XML badge you see here, but I created it using straight CSS markup rather than as a graphic. Joshua (the man behind GeoURL) decided to make a graphic file version of the badge available, and it’s interesting to note that although this is less convenient to put on one’s web page, the majority of the sites using either one seem to be using the graphic. I suspect this correlates to how well their browsers render the CSS: “Oh, that’s ugly. I like the graphic better. I’ll use that.” Or possibly they look at the CSS code and think “Okay, I know a little HTML, but I don’t know what all that gobbledygook is. I’m scared and confused. I’ll use the graphic.” The graphic is actually a screenshot of the CSS, and the two are pixel-for-pixel identical on my screen.

GeoURL is another snazzy way to create a linkage between Internet and physical geography. It helps you create a couple meta tags expressing your meatspace coordinates, which you stick in the header of your blog. You then ping it, and it adds you to its list. This could help make some interesting things possible, apart from just figuring out who your real-world neighbors are in the blogosphere.

This also led me to the ACME mapper, which showed me a 1 meter-per-pixel image of my street, shown here.