Twitter Airlines
March 2, 2008
Russell Beatie asserts that everyone else seem to be missing a core – and maybe the most important – feature of Twitter: No spam or trolls. Thanks to engtech for the link. Russell is right that this feature is remarkable, given that Twitter has a million users.
However, Twitter also seems to be the web service of a million outages. So Russell’s post reminded me of the Onion article from 2000 about bad service deterring terrorists from using airlines.
His flight from O’Hare to LaGuardia delayed more than six hours, Hamas militant and would-be suicide bomber Nidal Hanani vowed never again to fly United Airlines.
If you think that jokes about terrorists and airlines aren’t funny, I have too responses. One: shut up Rudy. Two: if we can’t laugh, the terrorists, trolls, and spammers have won.
Defensio Against Comment Spam
November 7, 2007
Defensio is a spam comment blocker. Defensio boasts a few features lacking in Akismet, most notably the ability to sort your blog’s blocked comments by “spamminess”, according to Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch. That got me interested enough to try the Defensio plugin at my WordPress test blog, but then realized that WordPlay doesn’t get enough spam comment to provide a test of Defensio.
Mark refered to “a few features lacking in Akismet,” and goes on to imply Defensio’s “open API that makes the blocker available for use with non-blogging applications” is one of them. But that feature is present in Akismet, and clearly described in the FAQ: The Akismet API can be adapted for almost any application with submitted content, including forums, wikis, and contact forms.
