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Akismet does a killer job filtering out the spam comments on Surfarama, but I do still scan the comments in the list for moderation to ensure no false positives, and also because sometimes I find something kinda interesting…like the spam comment Akismet just gobbled up where the spammer had simply linked to a user profile page on The Washington Times website:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/users/Tylenole/ (by all means click this, just don’t click on the ads on the page you land on)

I guess they’ve done this because a link to washingtontimes.com is less likely to be filtered as spam either automatically (until it gets finger printed by Akismet) or under manual review. Click on the link though and you can see that the spammer has cleverly hijacked that page using some javascript to redirect to the real place he wanted to send you over at ipafeed.com where they have loads of ad links for various drugs. [UPDATE: This has been fixed so the page no longer redirects]

According to Compete their spammy tactics are reasonably effective too with 30-40k visitors per month.

I guess the lesson is to be careful what you let users do with your profile pages if you run a aite with membership. Unfortunately for the Washington Times this reflects badly on them and now their domain is probably implicated as a spam site by services like Akismet which finger print dodgy links in blog comments.

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UPDATE: Good on them…looks like the Washington Times have fixed it to remove the javascript redirect from the spammers profile page.

This post has taken a while to get out the door, but it probably isn’t completely a bad thing because now I can reflect on my trip to Beijing without gushing too much.

As an undergrad I studied some Chinese economic history and I’ve wanted to visit mainland China ever since. I’ve been to Hong Kong on business a bunch of times and have always loved that, but never been to China proper before now.

The timing was pretty good too, we managed to get a great deal on Air New Zealand’s inaugural direct flight into Beijing which was kinda cool with the CEO, Rob Fyfe, and NZ’s Minister of Tourism, Damien O’Connor, onboard to celebrate the opening the of the new route. We even had a Maori welcome party at the Beijing end…

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Been a bit frustrated with some bugginess in the iPhone app store, particularly when downloading apps directly over the air. Still, nothing that a soft restore didn’t fix.

Posting this from the Worspress app which seems pretty sweet..might even me inclined to blog more if I can easily embed pix too.

Superman Vacuuming

Originally uploaded by Charles.

No reason for posting this except I get a giggle out of it every time I look at it…even Superman needs to do the domestics sometimes.

So I was refreshing the Vodafone New Zealand site this morning at 10am along with the rest of the country (and probably lots of people beyond) to see what the iPhone plans were going to be for the release of the new Apple iPhone 3G locally. Of course Vodafone were woefully underprepared and the site crashed instantly (Lance calls it amateur hour).

Lucky for Vodafone Mauricio was on to it and managed to keep Geekzone alive despite the traffic jam so we all got to finally see the plans and the initial reactions were not good. Twitter lit up with a roundly negative response…it’s been funny to watch Summize update with peoples opinions. The Geekzone forum has had a similar tone.

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If you are reading this in a feed reader can you please leave a comment on my blog to let me know. My RSS feed appears to be broken, so I suspect no one is getting updates, but then again some people report seeing all the latest so it is a bit odd.

UPDATE: Thanks Justine. All good now…problem was between the chair and keyboard :)

This reminds me I need more music in my life.

I’ll Never Forget You

You can download the EP here.

This post has been sitting as a draft for weeks now, but this morning Dylan Bland’s post about focussing on the details prompts me to push it out there. I had been meaning to add some more thoughts, but I’ll probably never get around to it so here we go, as is where is…

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Stephan posted awhile back about being turned off by uninspiring business pitches which get lost in the details…

What typically happens is that the person gets lost in the weeds - caught up in the small details such as what the site will look like or what they are going to call it. That isn’t what I want to hear. You need to be able to tell me three things… [read the rest]

Of course I totally agree about the need to be able to pitch an idea focussing on just the problems solved and the benefits delivered rather that the minutia. The point being that you really can’t expect people to grok the details in the first five minutes, rather you need to get them to that ‘Aha’ moment so that they understand the value proposition.

That said, I also find the opposite to be true. The number of times I have had conversations with people about business ideas (typically web based) which exist only at the 30,000 foot level. Regardless of whether they can succinctly describe the business in such a way that gives me that aha! moment, I find it incredibly frustrating when they haven’t thought through even the simplest of details.

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