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I allow anonymous comments, but screen them. I would say that half - or more! - of my comments are now spam. Often in another language. (I got my first German spam yesterday, so I could actually read that one.) What's really upsetting is that two of the blog posts that get spammed the most are ones I wrote about my friend Bridget Zinn, who died in May.

It's nearly enough to drive me away from Live Journal. I know a lot of people have mirror or companion journals - is the spam issue as bad on other sites? Do other places handle it better?

Do you think I should just turn off anonymous comments altogether?

Other advice?

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By Dennis Baron

There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it.

According to the Guardian, growing numbers of “authors” are churning out meaningless ebooks by harvesting sections of text from the web, licensing it for a small fee from online rights aggregators, or copying it for free from an open source like Project Gutenberg. These authors—we could call them text engineers—contribute nothing to the writing process beyond selecting passages to copy and stringing them together, or if that seems too much like work, just cutting out the original author’s name and pasting in their own. The spam ebooks that result are composed entirely of prose designed, not to convey information or send a message, but to churn profits.

The other new source of empty text is content farms, internet sweatshops where part-timers generate prose whose sole purpose is to use keywords that attract the attention of search engines. The goal of content farms is not to get relevant text in front of you, but to get you to view the paid advertising in which the otherwise meaningless words are nested.

Ebook spam and content farms may sound like the antitheses of traditional writing, in that they don’t inform, stimulate thought, or comment on the human condition. They’re certainly not the kind of repurposed writing that Wired Magazine’s Kevin Kelly foresaw back in 2006 when he wrote that we’d soon be doing with online prose what we were already doing with music: sampling, copying, remixing, and mashing up other people’s words to create our own personal textual playlists.

Kelly, who was paid for his essay, also predicted that in the brave new world of digital text the value we once assigned to words would shift to links, tags, and annotations, and that authors, no longer be paid for producing content, would once again become amateurs motivated by the burning need to share, as they now do with such abandon on Facebook and Twitter.

But if we mash up Kelly’s futuristic vision with the harsh reality that strings of keywords may bring in more dollars than connected prose, then it’s possible that tomorrow’s writers won’t be bloggers, Tweeters, or even taggers, they’ll be scrapbookers, motivated by the burning need to cut and paste. The web may be making authors of us all, but the growing number of content-free links threatens to put writing as we know it out of business.

A cynic might argue that far too many writers have already mastered the art of saying absolutely nothing, so we shouldn’t be surprised if our feverish quest to capitalize on the internet, combined with the vast expansion of the author pool that the net makes possible, have created the monster of contentless prose. We get the writing we deserve.

Plus, things online having the attraction that they do, instead of damning these new genres, soon we may be teaching students how to master them. After all, no writing course is considered complete without a unit on how to write effective email. So it won’t be long before some start-up offers a course in text-mashing instaprose. Or an

Today's post is dedicated to those dreadful spam emails. I can not stand them and I know I'm not the only one. They're annoying. They're unwanted. They're hated.

I've had emails about my email winning the online lottery. Or emails from people overseas telling me if I just give them my bank account info, they'd deposit millions of dollars in it. Ha! Yeah, I'm giving my info to a bunch of strangers. NOT! And the troubling thing is people really fall for this! What about the emails mentioning the spam email victim compensation? That's hilarious to me. Spam email targeting spam emails. HAHAHA!

And I can't forget the emails that have women who want to cheat on their hubbies or women who want men with big...you know what I'm talking about. Or the ones with the penis growth pills. It would probably sound tempting...IF I WERE A MAN! Ugh!

Remember the Jack Prelutsky poem, Homework! Oh Homework? Well, in honor of the annoyance that is the spam email, I present to you, Spam Mail! Oh Spam Mail.

I love Squarespace, but their spam-handling tools are abysmal. Supposedly this will be addressed in an upcoming release but so far there's no word on when that release will be.

As a result, anyway, I have to put ALL comments through a moderation stage where each comment needs individual approval (ugh). Time-consuming and a hassle, but it's either that or let all the spam comments through...and there have been a LOT of spam comments which I've had to block.

I've been a bit behind in comment moderation but have caught up now. Apologies for anyone who has been wondering why their comment hasn't been posted!

Ahh yes! My ideal breakfast on a typical Saturday morning. But nowadays, this type of meal would only be served on special occasions (especially after a very heavy night of drinking) since it’s not exactly the healthiest of combos to start off with. (Yes in our household canned and processed meat deserves a special occasion) But gosh darnit, there’s nothing like waking up to the smell of rice, spam, and eggs (and hot sauce)  in the morning!

What’s your ideal breakfast?

It's not Video Sunday, but this marks a convergence of two of my favorite things. Neil Gaiman and Brotherhood 2.0. Everyone has their favorite Brotherhood video. Mine was the one where they sang Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone From Your Pants, but this one may upset the balance. Check it out.



Not only do we get to hear Neil Gaiman talk about sex (gurgle). Not only is there a shout-out to Coe Booth. But there is a SONG! I love the songs! And the "fat guy in a candy store line" will now undoubtedly be the last thing I randomly think about before I expire on my deathbed at the crusty old age of 102.