Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Jason Calcanis must be happy. Google just validated his entire business model with this post. What Jason talked about at le web 3 is that we need to work together to get the spam out of the internet and work together to do that. It is obviously directly linked with his editor driven search engine Mahalo, but still a valid point. Now
his entire business model was kind of validated by Google moving into the exact same space, getting people to write special pages about a certain subject. The important thing behind it is that the author of the page is personally identifiable, meaning that that person will have a hard time spamming. It will be interesting to see what the reaction of Jason will be to this.

It’s not all art, there is a lot of science to it, or so it seems. Check out this very well commented post on Techcrunch called The Secret Strategies Behind Many Viral Videos. So you think all of the top videos are there by accident? If you take a look at the most viewed videos all time there are a lot of brand videos on there for my taste. This made me wonder a few days ago how this happens and the article seems to be a good pointer.

In general, it’s simple. You spam, a quasi legal way. You have several youtube accounts and comment around, you post on forums, pay bloggers to post a video, use 5000-friends-accounts on facebook to distribute the video, … stuff like that. If the video then has a few qualities that the post talks about, you might have yourself a viral video. Congratulations

Akismet currently holds 34000 comment spams and several thousand are added each day, partly moving the server up to loads far over 50 and making everything unresponsive. Hence, I needed another solution and found Hashcash, a wordpress plugin that arguably works better than Captcha. So what does it do? Here is what they say on the site:
Every four hours, your blog picks a random large number (close to 32 bits). Whenever a visitor visits your permalink pages, an ajax call is made which retrieves some javascript. This javascript first decrypts itself, then executes itself again to retrieve the secret value, which it sets in the form. If a comment does not have this value, it is rejected. If a comment is rejected more than four times, the user is blocked for a specified period of time.

Sounds good and I hope it will work. Let’s see what happens. As long as I am not at 3000 comment spams a day, I am happy.