With a pinch of NaCl

Everypoet's Poetic Table of the Elements invites you to come read poetry sorted by the the Periodic Table. And you are invited to submit your own.

Did he mean "terns?"

To post this, we'll have to admit that we read the whole thing. Sigh. Ah well. From an Indiatimes piece on the current-earthshaking developments in Indian cricket.

The Ganguly-Greg saga seems to be taking new twits and turns with every passing day amid growing speculation about a rift in the Indian team.

Why you should enable Comment Verification on your blog

Have you been noticing the kind of comments that go: "Hi, I really liked this. I have a site on [something related to your post, with a link]. Do visit my blog when you have the time."

That's comment spam enabled by programs that search for relevant content and then slip in a comment. Thought we'd share an email with you, one that came in to one of my friends on the KatrinaHelp.

Hey Guys,

Sorry to have to bring this to your attention. I have just been revisiting the tsunami blog to catch up after being offline for some time.

There is new software on the market that is capable of automatically submitting comments on random blogs for the purposes of getting backlinks for SEO.
This software can be tweaked to only post on blogs in certain categories which can be set by the software operator. There are a few versions ,but new kid on the block is marketing hard. It has been aggressively marketed over the last 2 months. See holygrailofmarketing.com (Blogsubmitter Pro)

Yeah, we know. We deliberately didn't make the URL clickable.

Experienced blackhat SEO sploggers are setting the software to post comments on blogs which are popular and spidered regularly with strong rich content.

Heh heh. We wondered why our humble blog was being picked on. SEA-EAT we can understand. But us? Now we know. We have strong rich content, y'hear? Heh.

As disaster sites are in the news again, some people are using this software to post comments to posts on these blogs purely for the purposes of marketing their products, sometimes often illegal warez, gambling, porn sites, but mostly opportunistic marketers trying to take advantage of the link to a popular blog (which the software pings automatically after the comment is posted) to get the backlink spidered.

The nofollow tag stops google from following it , but according to users does not stop yahoo and others.

Webmasters who monitor the comments usually delete them quickly. To prevent autosubmitting most suggest adding (not sure what it's called) the box where you have to copy a graphic distorted letter image into a form to prove you are a human not a bot.

You can do this in blogger under settings > comments. Blogger calls it "comment verification." Turn it on.

See the range of examples on comments to the post on Tsunami Blog Re Blogging for Disaster Relief.(also previous post and maybe more)

I am a marketer myself, and own a copy of this software, which like any tool can be used responsibly or not.

But it made my blood boil when I saw the comments on Tsunami Blog.

Can somebody take a moment to delete these leeches sucking on the popularity of the disaster blogs, and using the victims newsworthiness to line their own pockets rather than assist those who need it!

Thanks,

XXXX

Well, leeches, suck no more on this disastrous blog. We have comment verification turned on. Apologies to our regular commenters. Plis to adjust.

Yo, space cadet!

The line starts here.

Ignore this

Just filing this away for our own reference. A little online trove of Ogden Nash poems.

If you're in the 'hood...

...here's how to find me.

If you're interested, that's via an interesting newish site called MapmyIndia, which, for a limited period, lets you create a free e-locator (that's what is linked to in the previous paragraph). There's a more detailed note in my column, for which you'll have to wait till Sunday.

The buck starts here

Reproduced from my column

Project Why “Rupee a day” festival
It’s less than you paid for this paper. And that’s what Project Why(a Delhi-based NGO that works with deprived children, mainly in education) would like you to consider donating to support their efforts. And now, with the start of our long festival season, they’re trying to reach more people. They’re looking for ideas, so head over if you have any. And yes, they could also use that rupee a day. (Project Why’s founder also runs a blog: http://projectwhy.blogspot.com/.)

And here's a bit from a mail from Anouradha Bakshi, the founder of ProjectWhy.

Project Why is in the s**** house as we really have no funds beyond this month.

http://herewego.wikispaces.org/whyOnerupee

The above explains why.. and more whys.

The thing is that till date we have been working on oxygen that yours truly keep bringing, now we need lungs, and the major one is the one rupee.

My friend Sophie, a volunteer and lovely lady, said it would need 4 people to get 3 and 3 only 6 times..

Now I hate chain letters and pyramid marketing but can you think of a way to put this across. Let me confess something, I am not a great believer and yet I believe and the last few days I have been seeking help from the invisible forces.. now maybe you are just one of them!

The thing is that if I do not get the act together, many will lose their hope in life.

Now, we normally pour scorn on chain letters too, and have physically removed a pyramid marketer from the premises once upon a when.

But we do believe in invisible forces.

That is, the blogosphere.

So, those of you who honour this blog (or the atom or rss feed) with your time, you've rallied around for less. Would you care to pass this worthy meme on?

(For the lit-inclined and those of the writerly persuasion, you could also point to this wonderful idea from Jikku of Funny, Filthy, Flawed, Gorgeous, which we mentioned a few days ago.)

The land of the brave

Siddharth Varadarajan writing in The Hindu

Virtually four years to the day terrorists levelled the World Trade Center, a federal court in the United States has delivered another shocking body blow to the edifice of civil society in that country. In a unanimous verdict on Friday, the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld as legal one of the most controversial weapons the Bush administration has armed itself with in its "global war on terror": the power to incarcerate anybody — including U.S. citizens — indefinitely, without charge.
[...]
What this means is that unless the Supreme Court overturns this verdict, Mr. Padilla — like the non-U.S. prisoners at Guantanamo — will remain in legal limbo. And since the war on terror has been described by U.S. officials as "an endless war," the period of incarceration could also be endless. Indeed, the U.S. administration is now at liberty to invoke the power of indefinite detention against anyone it likes, since the Appeal Court considered the exercise of presidential powers to be unconstrained by any consideration about the authenticity of allegations levelled against an individual to be detained.
[...]
In other words, Judge Luttig and his colleagues have legitimised preventive detention without a time limit and without the need to demonstrate either necessity or proportionality.

President Bush has declared a war against a faceless, stateless enemy, and the power to detain `enemy combatants' is paramount, not the right of a citizen to contest the basis of his detention.

Truth in media

This one's probably winging its way around the web by now, but nevertheless:



(: Via Objet Petit M on CSF, who got it from Demockery :)

Shabash

Badmash has a take on the press coverage post-Katrina.