Reflections From a Murky Pond

Spam, it’s a fact of life in this digitally connected age. All of us online – in just about any fashion – have to deal with it. It’s in our email and even in our cellphones these days and, if we run blogs, it’s in our comments.

While most of the spam in email and text messages is “mass mailings”  or a phishing / malware attacks, that in our blog comments is normally an attempt at “Black Hat SEO.”

Blog comment spam has gotten a lot more sophisticated recently, with spammers crafting the “comments” to fit keywords on blogs in order to make them actually look relevant and less “spammy.” This has led to some funny results such as the spam comment shown below.

Howdy, i read your blog occasionally and i personal a similar one and i was just wondering should you get a lot of spam comments? If so how do you prevent it, any plugin or anything you can advise? I get so much recently it’s driving me mad so any assistance is very much appreciated.

The irony and/or sarcasm and sheer chutzpah of this particular piece of blog spam was so funny to me that, when I checked my spam filter for false-positives, I almost approved the comment out of appreciation for the laughs it gave me – almost.

Unexpected Consequences Of Spammer Sophistication Are Possible

I wonder if things will inadvertently come to what XKCD jokes about. Could improved spambot AI’s actually supplant human comments?

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The Tea Parties and their supporters are much maligned by the Liberals. Those Liberals have taken great pains to paint all dissent against President Obama’s Leftist agenda as racist, but have taken especial pains to paint the Tea Parties and their supporters as a latter day Klu Klux Klan.

In truth, it’s an easy bit of rhetoric for the Liberal politicians, power brokers, and their MSM operatives such as Olbermann and Maddow, to use against the Tea Parties, since it resonates with both a large segment of the Black population and Leftist Whites as well.

It’s a simple fact that, when you’re a Liberal who is supporting America’s First Black President, who you’ve decided cannot be allowed to fail, a crowd of angry White Americans protesting his policies and agenda is both a danger and an opportunity.

After the Internet allowed the Tea Parties and alternate or citizens’ journalism outlets to largely refute the Liberals’ and their MSM operatives original tactic of only depicting and reporting upon the “lunatic fringe” of the protesters at the various rallies the Liberals fell back on a simple statement to continue to paint the Tea Parties as racists:

You never see Blacks at the Tea Party protests and rallies; the Tea Party is all White and, therefor, must be racist. No matter what the Tea Partiers are saying, it’s really all about race.

This is, admittedly, a somewhat alluring argument. The Tea Parties, after all, do seem to be a White phenomenon; one rarely, if ever, sees a Black among the crowds shown during coverage of the events. This means it’s certainly reasonable to question why there is such a seeming racial disparity between Blacks and Whites in the Tea Parties.

Is this racial disparity evidence of the racism of the Tea Party supporters or is this disparity caused by factors other than racism, prejudice, and animosity?

Read the rest of this entry »

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Facebook Integration

Reflections From A Murky Pond is now integrated with Facebook.

Readers can now log into this blog with their Facebook account and can publish their comments on their Facebook profiles as well as on Reflections From A Murky Pond, if they so wish.

Facebook users’, when logged in, will also now display their Facebook profile picture with their comments instead of either their Gravatar or the blog’s default commenter image.

I have also – with the great help of the WordPress plug-in, WPBook – created a Facebook Application that allows bidirectional integration and synchronization between Reflections From A Murky Pond and Facebook. Now both posts and comments from the blog will show up in the application on Facebook and comments made within the Facebook application (http://apps.facebook.com/murkypond) will also appear in the blog itself.

The application creates a small box in the Facebook users’ profiles that presents the headlines for Reflections From A Murky Pond’s five(5) most recent posts.

Application Widget Screenshot

Clicking on any of the headlines will take the Facebook users to the full application where they can view the post and its comments, and also comment themselves if they so choose.

I’m hoping that this will facilitate a greater reach for the blog and an easier means of communication and commenting since so many of us are on Facebook these days.

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