So the spammers have found this blog. This weekend I received 200 spam-messages in the comments. To keep the stresslevels of both me and the server low, Peet turned on the well-known little application that checks if you’re human and are able to read in a humanly way when leaving a comment. I’m sorry I have to do that.

Is it a coincidence that the spam began immediately after I blogged Blogonomics, and linked web-log.nl? I don’t think so. In a lot of senses it so predictable. (So bloggers using blogsoftware who until now did not have to fight comment-spam: do not link to commercial stuff…).

And yes, the comment-spam is in some way intelligent. It understand that I also use Dutch (if I remember well there was a bit of Dutch in the spam). It understands that I blog “intellectual” stuff (“Man your blog is so cognitive”). But I can spot the spam: URLs ending with .pl cannot be trusted without thinking twice. Sorry Poland.

The fight against spam can only be seen in terms of war.

How can blogs primarily be seen and conceptualized as conversations, when the comments-functionality is always on the brink of being destroyed by spammers? (When leaving a comment I prefer not to type over a few dancing letters or numbers; when managing my blog I prefer not to have to spend minutes or more on fighting spam).

And, now that we’re on this topic: at the moment I do have quite a problem with spam. It seems that some people do not receive my mail when it’s send from my normal mail-adress (that I have been using since 1997). Very annoying. (So: if you have send me mail and did not receive a reply, it is possible that I did write a reply that ended up in the spambox of your mail).

This happened to me as well when organizing Sonic Acts: every day I had to wade through the spambox to find the mails of Kim Cascone and Greg Kurcewicz.