Everybody is blogging and making an attempt, however lame, to write the living web (I include myself in the lame attempts crowd). Anyway, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of terrible blogs out there, and I don’t mean content. I’m not a great artist by any means, but I’d like to think that it’s easy to read my content. I ran across a blog that was almost entirely in italics today, and after my eyes stopped bleeding, only one question came to mind. Why? Italics and bold type were created to emphasize material.
So does that mean your ego is enormous if you feel compelled to emphasize your entire blog from header to footer and everything in between? Probably not, but there has to be some reasoning behind it, and I would love to hear it.

If everyone is going to blog, and everyone is going to voice their opinions, spin their own news, and write the web, why can’t it be done in a legible manner? If I were a HS (or college) English teacher, I would require daily blogging, and I would encourage the knowledge of web standards. Start teaching these kids xhtml/css and how to roll their own blog and to write for the web while they’re still young and will listen to you (even if its only for a grade). It will help raise the bar for blogging content.

How would Martha Stewart accessorize a house arrest ankle bracelet?

We knew it was going to happen.. just a matter of time. Six Log got hit with some lovely Trackback spam. Wasn’t Typekey supposed to take care of blog spam? Was it not touted as the cure-all for the spam problems bloggers were having everywhere? I had been asking about turing and comment moderation for a while, but neither made it into MT and I didn’t feel compelled to spend my money on it. The hardcore MT crowd spent a lot of time talking about the Wordpress defectors, but a lot of people left because MT3 did not solve the problems that needed a solution like the spam issue.

Since I migrated my blog from MT to Wordpress, the comment spam has dried up. Perhaps Google hasn’t finished indexing my site or I’m just not drawing as much traffic as I used to. I don’t know what caused the change but I love the peace and quiet. Comment moderation seems to be quite effective. I have heard a lot of stories about Typekey has driving away comments while people are still getting comment spam. I thought Typekey was a good idea for a minute and realized it’s just going to create more work for the readers. When you make your readers work too hard, they don’t stick around. When I was using CMS software like Xoops and PostNuke, I had the same problem. The users didn’t feel like creating logins to see certain content so they didn’t. The news page got tons of hits and no one went any deeper. With precious few readers, the less work you make them do, the better.