Life is Healthy

Director Kevin Smith's blog is called My Boring Ass Life. What's in a name?

Blogger and news correspondent Kevin Sites has been nominated for an Emmy. Congratulations Kevin! (Via BoingBoing)

Aliens love blogs too!

Alien Blog IconSome 60 years ago humans first began transmitting television signals powerful enough to reach beyond our earth's atmosphere. Since then the media has continued to broadcast messages from I Love Lucy to the five o'clock news into space, potentially reaching intelligent alien life forms beyond our solar system. Blogs In Space is the first entity to allow everyday bloggers to transmit the news and thoughts of an everyday person into space. Simply put we take your feed and transmit it out on a powerful deep space transmission dish.

From CNET's latest top 10 list: "Whether it was dancing hamsters, a kid enjoying his day as a Jedi Knight, or the sudden ability to publish your thoughts online with just a few simple clicks, the following 10 Web fads still make us laugh, make us wonder, or make us feel guilty enough to update our blogs."

At #9, it's neat that Blogger is both on this list of memes as well as the means by which such memes are propagated. Take that Kiss Me Mahir!

Also, it reminds me that we should make some new t-shirts.

Wired News has published an article about Blogs Taking Off in Cambodia.

A Cambodian nonprofit worker traverses the country, teaching students to publish blogs. The project promotes democracy and spurs internet use in a land where few people have access to the web. Matt Reed reports from Phnom Penh.

This slideshow of photos from some photoblogs over at the BBC's web site is neato. Should you be so inspired, remember that you can upload photos to your blog for free. So, post 'em if you got 'em.

I was just reading BoingBoing and found this blog by incessant doodler Paige Pooler. She's got a little blogfolio going over there. I like it.

Daddy Types calls attention to some interesting developments of the blogging-at-work variety. There was this Nanny, see. And she had this blog. And her employers started reading it and they didn't think it was the best thing ever so they fired her. But they didn't just fire her. They sifted through her blog looking for anything that could be pulled out and made to sound unseemly. Then one of these former employers published an essay in The New York Times which began thusly:

OUR former nanny, a 26-year-old former teacher with excellent references, liked to touch her breasts while reading The New Yorker and often woke her lovers in the night by biting them. She took sleeping pills, joked about offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson and determined she'd had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend.

The Daily Show recently underwent a set redesign and people are not happy about the fact that the couch is gone. Especially this guy.

I spent last week in Boston. However, before I left I went to an Ottmar Liebert concert at the Saratoga Mountain Winery, the beautiful venue pictured above. In addition to playing some amazing music, Ottmar is supremely *with it* Free Culture style. (This came as no surprise of course since it was Eric Case that turned me on to his acoustic stylings and geektastic leanings.) Ottmar is blogging, he's podcasting, and he's released his music under a Creative Commons Sampling Plus license. Here's what he said to much applause at the end of strong set at the winery:

"I decided that copyright, it sort of seemed like everybody was holding on to everything. So as an artist I thought, "What can I do?" Open the hand. So what we're doing is releasing the album with a Creative Commons license. It's a sampling plus license."

We've re-enabled post counts on the dashboard. But remember, it's quality not quantity.

Via BoingBoing comes this post at The Republic of Geektronica: The Strange World of Blogspot Spamblogs, which points out a new kind of spam on Blog*Spot. People are creating seemingly legitimate news blogs which contain spam links cleverly hidden by CSS. Geektronica, you rock. Thanks for finding this sneaky spam. We're hoping to leverage more of this kind of help from the community in the future.

But wait! There are a few things I'd like to address in the Geektronica post. The post states that Blogspot "apparently does not have a policy against" spam but our Terms of Service states that we will terminate spam (and we do). It also says "Blogspot now requires CAPTCHA authentication to start a new account." We require CAPTCHA authentication to create new blogs, not new accounts. There's a big difference there because one account can have many blogs. While we're on the subject of CAPTCHA let me say that we never thought it would "fix the problem" of spam. CAPTCHA has had an impact but also has accessibility drawbacks that prevent it from being a complete solution.

The braintrust here at Google has lots of experience dealing with spam and the Blogger crew is actively leveraging this talent to find new ways to combat the problem. Kudos to The Republic of Geektronica for taking note of this new wrinkle and yes, we are working hard against spamblogs.