I have a few Google Wave invites available if anyone out there would like one, just leave me a comment and put make sure you put your correct e-mail address into the DISQUS commenting system.

Wave is pretty slick and if you need to do some online collaboration and don’t mind a fairly open environment then this is the perfect product for you.  Wave is NOT a replacement for e-mail,  instant messaging, or your online social networks,  although it pulls in components from all of those types of communication.

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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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