Loren Baker asked representatives at Google, Yahoo! and Ask how they are respecting the No Follow attribute on links. It turns out that Google is the only one ignoring these links and that ask.com is not checking for them at all. Arggg! This is very disappointing. You can blame Yahoo! and Ask for the continued acceleration of blog comment spam.

Today, I got a very funny email response to a previous blog entry. I'll edit the email so that the spammers doesn't getting any juice out of this.

Dear Mr. Morin,

I recently noticed this entry on your [xxx] weblog: [xxx]

Where you imply that visits from my website are fake. That is simply not the case. You "examine the referrer logs" and found no clicks on javascript links. I'm not even sure what javascript links you're talking about, I don't see any useful ones.

The explanation you were looking for, in case you never sussed it:

My users are smarter than yours. They browse with javascript off. And they don't click on ads. For six years [xxx] has been an oasis online for the most open-minded and internet-literate.

I can't believe that a referral spammer would even bother responding. I really loved his explanation, so I thought I'd share. His users are smarter than mine and turn javascript off. Of course, the tracking software I was using (Analytics) is based 100% on javascript, so if this were true, then I'd have seen 0 referrals from him. Anyhow, I responded with the obligatory ROTFLMAO.

Chris Pirillo just uncovered a security issues in Google Calendar. If  you search public calendars for user password, then you get a lot of them. Unsure if this is users that have inadvertently put their username and password in a public meeting request, or if Google has a severe problem at hand.

http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/04/22/google-calendar-security-notice/

Automated unsolicited communication is going to kill global communications. I don't mind if someone picks up the phone and calls me, but I'm starting to get an unbearable amount of phone calls from automated dialing machines. BTW, I'm unlisted. We're going to require a spam filtering telephone technology in the near future or the telephone will become obsolete and useful. This is all frustrating. Especially while I watch antiquated governments fail to react.

YouTube users love to mix pictures and video with real music. Unfortunately, this is almost always a copyright violation. YouTube wants to change that and is experimenting with a new feature called AudioSwap which allows you to mix your video with officially licensed music. Try it!

http://www.youtube.com/audioswap_main

Review: The selection of music is very limited and the previewer didn't seem to work; it was mute.

On Twitter, Scoble is reporting that he's got so much blog comment spam that he can no longer take the time to check for false positives. Me too! In fact, I have to rework my entire comment spam system. I gave up while on vacation and never got back in the groove.

http://twitter.com/Scobleizer/statuses/25276511