It must be admitted that I am a newbie when it comes to some of the new blog terminology out there. After writing the snippet about TheRegisters interview of an unnamed link spammer, I wanted to know more about the “traceback” feature of blogs, what it means, how it works, that sort of thing.

I found my answers and figured I’d share them here so other people can get an answer in Google to the What is a traceback? question. A traceback (also called a “trackback” by some) is used as an alternative to posting a big comment on someone else’s blog. Instead, you post about the subject on your own blog, and then put a traceback URL in pointing to the post on the other blog your post is referring to. The blog with the story you were posting about receives the traceback and can include a link to your blog article in their own system. It is basically a form of content aggregation between web sites.

The talk about traceback spamming is I presume when some nasty type posts tracebacks to your blog that link back to spammers blogs trying to flog all manner of stuff you usually read about in spam. (or try not to read about as is most likely the case.) So there you have it, a traceback/trackback is a method of automatically cross linking articles of similiar subject matter between blogs. There is a pretty good explaination of traceback/trackback at the movable type blog site here.

Microsoft have been playing around with their own search technology for ages now, and had a working beta that I’ve mentioned here a couple of times before. Well, now they have rolled it out in place of their previous Yahoo results. It will be interesting to see how that affects our hits from MSN, as their new system seems to produce results more like Google’s then Yahoo’s. And we fair pretty well with Google. I’d say it will be years before they have a service as clean as Google, but one thing Microsoft has in big heaped piles, is money, they can simply throw money at their search engine until it’s good. (They already have it seems) And Microsoft have one of the best marketing departments in the IT industry. Even the truth can’t stop a good marketing campaign over there. Google is in for a fight, because you can bet MSN search will be built into everything in the next version of Windows due out in 2006/2007. Think I’ll stick with Google, I just trust them more.

Read more at Eweek.

Glad I don’t know what a haiku is if it makes you think like this! Fortunately I don’t have that much to write about that is negative. Still interesting site to ramble around when you are tired of coding.

We are regularly asked how to copyright web content. The best source of United States Copyright information is the Copyright Office web-site. You can register on-line literary works or writings for the cost of $30 U.S. While you can register a copyright for your web-site content, you CANNOT copyright your domain name.

While you can register your copyright, and gain several rights (statutory damages, attorneys fees and prima facia evidence of copyright to name the biggest of them) from doing so, you don’t need to to be protected. You are automatically protected on publication if the work is unique and your own. Even non-United States parties may be protected by U.S. copyright laws if their country of domicile has reciprocal agreement (see pdf formatted list of such countries) with the United States.

When this article showed up in my Thunderbird RSS reader I just had to follow though and read the whole article. The story is about an un-named blog link spammer and goes into why they do it, how they do it, and what stops them.

The interesting thing is that the biggest hurdles to blog spamming, are email response systems and captcha’s, like the one we just employed to stop the problem. Captcha’s are human intervention tools, they are hard or impossible to automate, because a program has a great deal of trouble reading the text on the images, and so can’t post to the blog. (A captcha is a piece of random generated text saved to an image and put into the comment form, a human has to type the text in the image into a provided text box in order to post a comment.)

Other things to note, is that he isn’t particularly concerned about the new link attribute added by the search engines, because there are millions of old abandoned blogs on the net that will not be updated. And that the link spammers use open proxy servers to post the comments, which is why blocking IP address’s is mostly a useless effort. (because they will be different each time.) If you have ever suffered from blog spamming, you should read this to get a feeling for the enemy. “He” actually blames the search engines for creating the opportunity to blog spam. I expect that some effort needs to be spent convincing ISP’s and users to shut down or update abandoned blogs, or the problem will never go away. Without old blogs to target, the problem would become a non issue in a matter of months. One thing is certain, if the problem is not stopped, we will end up with a separate blog search index to general Internet search, and that will hurt all manner of blogs and news sites based on blog software.

The FTC are slowly closing loopholes that were found in the recent Can-SPAM act that was designed to make the sending of SPAM illegal in the US. The act was widely criticized when it came out because it had many loopholes that allowed spammers off the hook, and also because it could potentially effect legitimate e-mail marketing.
Apparently SPAM has had a slight decline of late, but there is still a long way to go. Read more at InternetNews.

Sometime between 3AM and 12PM today, IE6 usage dropped below 50% for the first time ever (with Firefox at 34.1%). I was asleep at the time, so I have no better idea exactly when it happened. Still, it’s great news. It isn’t just htmlfixit that is showing huge Firefox usage, most tech related sites are getting similar results. From my experience, what the tech sites show now, the normal sites will show in roughly a year from now. So if your site is not W3C standards friendly, now is the time to fix it.