Blog Spam Article in PC Advisor
A friend pointed me to this blog spam article in PC Advisor that paraphrases the meat of a presentation I gave about blog spam at the MIT Spam Conference in March. For the most part, Cara Garretson does a great job of summarizing my presentation. She got a few details incorrect that I want to clarify here.
The blogging initiative at Harvard University is a project the Berkman Center for Internet & Society began in 2003. It’s only four years old. I attended my first blog meeting in April, 2003. There’s no way I could have been involved in it for seven years.
I don’t presently have tens of blogs on seven different platforms. I think I was contributing to about thirty weblogs on about seven different platforms at the height of my blogging. I have since forgotten the fine details. I contribute to far fewer now–perhaps even fewer than ten–but I haven’t counted recently and I’m not going to tonight. (How do I count the Manila blogs that are disappearing in a few days … ?)
In the last paragraph, it sounds like the organization I mentioned is heartlessly destroying lots of good content because of the need to shut down a server. It has made every reasonable effort it can to inform the people using that server about the upcoming changes and to encourage them to get their content. It is also providing a different blog server running different software and giving people the opportunity to voluntary migrate from one server to another. Before shutting down the server, they’re going to back up all of the content in case someone needs it later.
I’m fairly certain I gave her my contact information after my talk. I don’t recall receiving an e-mail from her with any follow-up questions.
