One of Australia's largest retail banks, NAB has taken to leaving spam comments on blogs as part of a targeted promotion for a new product, according to an article published at Crikey today. The bank apparently thought they'd "give it a try" as "blogs are a public forum", and believed that blog moderators would delete any comments they felt were inappropriate. Another way of saying they didn't contact ... Read full entry

From the Akismet homepage: 92% of all comments are spam 92 per cent?! That's amazing... I've seen one or two bloggers mention heightened problems with comment spam in recent days, and it looks like the tidal wave has reached disassociated. There's always been rubbish to remove but it has quadrupled in the last couple of days. Anyone else likewise noticing an upward trend in comment spam?

EarthBook: Satellite Art. High altitude, high resolution photographs of the Earth's surface, sourced from Google Earth, presented by Sydney web designer Craig Rozynski. "I often find myself breathless, trying to make sense of impossibilities on the Earth's surface." Neoclassical Theme for WordPress: an elegantly designed three column Wordpress theme, that includes a rotating random header script. See a different masthead image each time you reload your browser. ... Read full entry

I don't know if I like to whinge, or just like to whinge about whingers, but here I go anyway. Most Wordpress bloggers will be familiar with Akismet, a plugin that helps control comment spam. Like anything it is not 100 per cent fool proof, but overall I think it does a pretty good job of quarantining comment spam. For those unfamiliar with the process, Akismet will "sideline" suspect comments ... Read full entry

Apologies for the longer than expected outage during the upgrade to Wordpress 2.2.1... one or two files didn't make the upload (no one click installs on this web server - it's a manual process!), so things didn't quite run as expected. All should be well now. And I enabled Akismet after the upgrade... it seems someone (a spammer) was trying to dispense dodgy share market advice here earlier!