As part of my Whimsday series of posts I will occasionally post an idea that I’ve had that I have no time or skill to successfully complete.  I hope maybe you will, it will be wildly successful, and you’ll decide to thank me with a car or something.

Where is the App for 25 Random Things?  What has no one thrown something together yet?  This thing has gone viral on several social networks and if you put together an app that let you list and change your items, send out invites, LINK when your friends install and fill out their 25 random things, and then send out feed notices when someone changes their items - it seems like you would have an easy winner!

I’ve never tried my hand at developing for Facebook but hopefully their are enough features that you could put something together that is snazzier that the ‘notes’ that are currently being used, so somebody get to work on this!  I’ll be awaiting the delivery of my Prowler or failing that a nice hybrid sometime in the next couple of months  :-p

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Are you getting human spam on your blog?  I am.

If you are running Disqus right now and have some pages with page rank there is a good chance that you are getting hit with human spam from site owners trying to accomplish some bargain basement SEO requiring the bare minimum of work.  This isn’t limited to Disqus, but since Disqus continues to leave NOFOLLOW off of the link to the user’s website in their username they have become a specific target.

It’s pretty trivial to mark these guys as spam and the worst of them are easy to recognize because they’ll move from page to page leaving the same worthless comment, but there are a few that have an interesting perspective on what they are doing and it’s worth thinking about before you start blowing away all the comments that they leave.

In comments left on my blog and on a thread I started about this problem on Disqus’s forums I’ve seen an attitude of entitlement from the Spammers that put the smallest amount of effort to customize their spam comment to the content of the page.  Their logic (?) is that comments add value to a site and by leaving a comment that is somewhat on target they “earn” the link and the SEO value that it instills.

There is some truth to this perspective, comments mean a lot to a blogger.  They add new content to a page and keep it active and updating something that Google likes to see, they can also provide new search terms and enhance the keyword usage on the page, helping it rise in the search results.

What human spammer’s fail to take into account, and where their perspective diviates so far from that of mine, is that comments are encouragement and validation of a bloggers work.  That engagment is worth more than all the SEO benefit a spammer can offer me and why I take such offense at their half hearted attempts and sense of entitlement and why so few of their comments will be allowed to stand here.

That’s my perspective - what’s yours?

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Today’s Whimsday post is a celebration!  I started this blog on a whim, it seemed a good way to share and learn new things.  Last week I reached a minor milestone, my Wordpress stats show that I’ve had a quarter of a million page views since I started the Knetwork.  To celebrate I’ve changed my theme, something I’ve intended to do for a while now.  I hope you enjoy the theme and thanks to everyone that reads this for making running the site such a rewarding endeavor!

-David

Before the end of last year I had started playing with a cool new piece of technology called Triggit that made adding advertising and affiliate links easy to do without spamming them all over the place. As my blogging decreased towards the end of the year, I was mainly focused on quick pieces and didn’t touch Triggit.

You may have noticed the blue search bar at the top of my site (if it’s loaded yet, I need to track down what’s been slowing my load times lately) That is called the Sitebar and Triggit has switched gears and is focusing on this new tool. What does it do? Well, right now it only searches but I’ve boon told to expect more functionality soon, I’ll update more as I get the information

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I suppose that someone knows because I saw one today and it was the first time I’ve really noticed one and thought about it.  So for today’s Wednesday Whim I decided to add one for the Knetwork.  All you need is an animated gif, scaled down to the recommended 16×16 pixel size, uploaded to your existing favicon location.  Then add a html line to your header.  Just copy your current favicon code, paste it below itself, and alter the file name to your animated gif.

FYI - mine is a little knight hacking away at something…. it’s probably dead by now.  I’ll probably replace it or remove it but lemme know what you think!

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1. Meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene
2. It is defined as conveying the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation
3. It is derived from the Greek word “mimema” meaning something imitated
4. The study of memes is known as Memetics
5. It is intended to provide a definition for the way ideas and trends move through society as genetic traits move from generation to generation through genes
6. Genes are considered to move vertically from generation to generation,  although with current genetic research it’s possible they may even move horizontally within a generation at some point in the future
7. Memes are considered to move either vertically or horizontally
8. Good examples of memes that move vertically are cultural trends like racism, speech patterns, pizza crust preferences and the type of BBQ sauce you consider to be the only true BBQ
9. Good examples of horizontal memes are fashion, slang, and the belief that Al Gore truly deserved a Nobel Peace Prize
10. A fad is considered to be a phenomenon that becomes popular for a very short time.
11. A fad technically fits the description of a horizontal meme since it is transmitted and imitated
12. The short time period indicates that it is a failed meme, a dead end on the cultural evolutionary tree
13. Thankfully!
14. Although Jams were awesome - why don’t we wear those anymore?
15. Calling your short lived internet fad a meme will make you feel more important
16. You’re not
17. Calling it a meme will make you feel more sophisticated
18. You’re not that either
19. Calling it a meme might confuse more people into taking part though
20. So I don’t blame you for doing it
21. But I still find it a little annoying
22. And I just wanted you to know…
23. That the meme you are participating in is just a glorified fad
24. And as long as you are OK with that, then go for it!
25. If “internet memes” are your thing you might want to spend some quality time with Encyclopedia Dramatica

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This is the first of my Whimsday Wednesday posts.   My latest whim was inspired when the little proxy server I was hosting became overrun.  It turned out I didn’t hide it as well as I thought, and people sucking down 40GB of bandwidth in a few hours can have a negative effect on all your other sites loading.  Once I tracked down the culprit and shut it off, I put up a quick note (see it @ KnightKnetwork.net)  saying that I had not intended it to be a public proxy and I added a google search and a small adsense unit to make it easy for folks to find another proxy and maybe make a couple of bucks.

Well, that worked out well enough that I’ve made enough to pay for a domain name and some cheap proxy hosting so I launched LiteProxySite.info this week!  I still need to do some work on it, but it’s functional.  If you need access to your sites that are blocked by your current network then this can help, but cheap hosting means low bandwidth so I’ve restricted the file size that it can pull down and may have to block some sites myself if it get’s overused.

I hope you find it useful!

Lite Proxy Site