Developers Dries Buytaert and Benjamin Schrauwen have announced the release of an all new anti-comment spam system called Mollom. Since Dries is the mastermind behind the community-building CMS Drupal, Mollom seems to have a wider remit than you might find with comparable systems like Akismet.

They’re not just going after the usual automated comment spam that most anti-spam focuses on. Mollom allows you to look at the entire spectrum of user contributed content and analyse it against a number of factors: spam, offensive/inflammatory content, aggressive content, etc.

I’ve installed the Mollom module on my personal Drupal website and I’m thinking seriously about installing it on a couple of other Drupal sites that I’m working on that are getting hit heavily with user account spam*. There’s an option in the config page for Mollom that indicates it can watch out for spam user accounts, which will be a godsend for anyone who runs an open community.

What Does Mollom Protect?

Well, looking at the configuration page (in Drupal 6), you can protect all your contact and comment forms, user registration and password request forms and input forms for any node type, such as blogs, pages, polls and stories. That’s pretty cool and covers all the possible ways a user (or a spam-bot) might try to enter spam on your site.

Effectiveness?

It’s too early to say. Give it a couple of days and we’ll see. My personal blog isn’t very heavily trafficked, so I may install it on another community site I’m working on to see how it handles user account and content spam.

Mollom works on three classifications: good content, bad content and content it is unsure of. When it’s unable to make a classification, Mollom will present a CAPTCHA box to the user to verify their input.

Getting Started With Mollom

There’s a fairly comprehensive post about Mollom over on Dries Buytaert’s blog that should get you up and running in no time. Unlike Akismet, which allows you to use the same key across multiple websites, Mollom requires you to create a key set for each website you plan to run it on.

It only takes a moment or two to get up and running, so visit the Mollom website for more information.

* User accounts that are created by software for the purposes of spamming.

The only drawback? I couldn’t get Writer working with Ultimate Tag Warrior. Until this evening…

Pascal VanHecke posted an excellent solution to add a custom tag provider to Live Writer’s built-in tag support.

Although he linked to some pre-setup information, you could miss this easily. I wanted to highlight that here.

If you’ve got a recent installation of WordPress with Ultimate Tag Warrior installed, log in to the Admin area and browse to Options, Tags and look for the option that reads Embedded Tags. Tick that box and save your settings. (The option to automatically generate META Keywords looks interesting too – might want to switch that on as well)

So, set this up in advance, follow Pascal’s instructions (and helpful graphics) and get blogging with Windows Live Writer!

I’ve been a member of the Performancing community for about 18 months now. Where previously the site was dominated by two big name bloggers who founded it, recently it has changed hands and provides an opportunity for other bloggers to showcase their knowledge and talent.

Although the Scribble Designs blog receives a reasonable amount of traffic, contributing at Performancing is a great way of increasing exposure and building my brand. And although I’ve been blogging for a considerable amount of time, this is the first time I’ve contributed my writing outside my own sites. It’s a great feeling to be able to pass on experience to other bloggers and share information and techniques with more established bloggers.

I don’t think it’s generating much traffic for Scribble Designs just at the moment, but I’ll watch with interest as time goes on, and report back here.

Basically, Darren sets a fairly wide topic and asks his readers to make submissions, link back to relevant posts and comment on blog posts they particularly like. I decided to get involved this time and write a Top 5 type of post. I’ll be the first to admit it wasn’t the most inspired nor was it my best writing to date. Participation was the most important thing in this instance.

Who’d have guessed the effect that Darren’s project would have? There were some 893 entries in total. The buzz was palpable as people flocked to each other’s blogs and discovered new material, left comments and linked back to each other.

I decided to do some analysis on my Top 5 Essential Sites for Bloggers post. I received a small amount of comments (but an increase nonetheless). The most interesting outcome was the backlinks. According to Technorati, I had something like 30 extra backlinks to the blog. I did a further check in Yahoo! Site Explorer and discovered 47 inbound links to that post.

Needless to say, I’m chuffed to see such an increase in the amount of backlinks to this blog.

I was surprised that so many people chose to repost Darren’s post in its entirety. Several people wrote lists of the posts they liked best from the writing project and included mine. All in all, the results of the ProBlogger effect are:

1. Moderate increase in traffic – no servers were harmed in the course of this experiment!
2. Increase in comments to the blog.
3. Whoa! Pingbacks galore!
4. More power in Technorati! Not that I care, but as I was watching the backlinks grow, I noticed my Technorati authority grew from 24 to 57.

I’d say for better posts there was the opportunity to go totally viral and wind up on Digg, del.icio.us, etc. I haven’t noticed it here on Scribble, but other blogs may notice an increase in RSS readership, especially the winning entrant.

Hopefully this post reflects my goals from blogging – which are writing quality content, generating traffic and making money from my blogs.

This post is also a part of the ProBlogger group writing project.

1. ProBlogger – Darren is the original problogger. He has covered all aspects of blogging over the last couple of years – from monetization of blogs through to search engine optimization and copywriting, he’s placed himself at the centre of the blogging industry. ProBlogger is an essential destination for anyone serious about blogging.
2. Performancing – The first of two communities on my list, Performancing has been completely reinvigorated in recent months by the efforts of Ryan Caldwell and Raj Dash. Both write from direct experience and participate to a fantastic extend in the Performancing community. Because it’s geared toward bloggers (the motto is “Helping Bloggers Succeed”), it’s easy to get involved in discussions in the forum or share your expertise through a personal blog entry.
3. John Chow – John will love this double-linkbaiting idea for evilness! Get a link from Darren’s writing project and a link from Chow! Seriously though, John Chow has some great ideas for how to make money online. From clever tricks with AdWords to affiliate marketing, there are loads of alternative methods of monetization for bloggers to explore. Also, if you do a review of his blog, he’ll link to it and send you a ton of traffic. Apparently.
4. Copyblogger – I initially underestimated Brian Clarke’s blog, Copyblogger, because at one point all he seemed to write about was the importance of writing titles. While Brian has a unique talent for taking a topic and beating it to death, he also writes one of the most focused blogs on the importance of writing quality content. Brian’s posting frequency is easy to keep up with, and provides plenty of food for thought.
5. SEOmoz – SEOmoz is a blog, an SEO company and an SEO community hub, all in one. Serious bloggers realise that to get traffic to your website organic SEO is crucial. SEOmoz is a fun place to participate in search engine discussions, and the bloggers (Rand and Rebecca mainly) make the topic fun and interesting with their comics and GoogleBot illustrations.

Those are my Top 5 blogging sites. If you can think of other resources, drop a link to them in the comments.

Well, a few weeks ago we formally launched two new blogs under the Unreality banner – Unreality Music (my baby) and Unreality Primetime (Lisa’s baby). Comparing our strategies last night, we realised we were taking extremely different approaches.

The Challenge

Over the course of the next twelve months, we will be battling each other to see who can build the most successful blog. We’ll measure success on a number of criteria, which I’ll reveal in a forthcoming post.

The Strategy

Lisa’s approach is primarily about content-building. She’ll watch the latest TV news and blog about it rapid-fire. I’ve never seen someone compile content so efficiently. Better still, she’s now got contacts in TV publicity, so she gets a lot of the inside scoop on shows. I joked with her at the weekend that there’s no point reading the TV guide anymore, because she’s usually two days ahead.

My approach to writing is much more methodical. I’ll be writing about music, so I research the band in advance. I’m a slower writer by nature anyway. On the music blog, I’ll be working on a link building strategy and possibly trying to use social media to gain backlinks to the blog, which Lisa isn’t too worried about – she built Unreality TV up mostly on organic SEO!

The Outcome

The Blog Battle will end on 1 May 2008. Along the way, we’ll compare readership, traffic stats and how our strategies are working. Hopefully we’ll have two fairly successful blogs by the end of the year. Posts in this series will be tagged Blog Battle.

More importantly, we’ll be able to tell you which approach works best for a blog – pure content building and organic SEO, or less content but more focused on link building and social media promotion.

The goal here is to establish two top quality blogs using different methods and see how they perform over time. Although monetisation will be involved, the main motivation is to have fun building two great sites.

Anyway, we hope that other bloggers out there will follow our experiment and chip in with their thoughts and advice along the way. May the best (music) blog win!

For whatever reason, some people took a dislike to Kathy and started singling her out for abusive comments on other blogs and forums. Some disturbing pictures appeared with Kathy’s head pasted on to them, and her personal details were leaked on the Internet.

Kathy is a high-profile example of how someone can be abused on the Internet. In a digital culture it’s easy to forget that there’s a real-life person on the other end of the screen. In the absence of human contact and direct accountability, some people think they can say or do anything online.

Recently, Tim O’Reilly published a draft Blogger’s Code of Conduct. It’s an attempt to lay down some basic principles for interaction on the web. I have a problem with it though. I don’t think it’ll work.

Why a blogger’s code of conduct won’t work:

No Enforcing Authority
In an opt-in system like this, the people who will adopt a code of conduct are probably fairly ethical already. What about the trolls? Well, they’ll just continue character assassination as before – why should they care about a code of conduct that has no authority to back it up?

Unclear Legal Jurisdiction
So, what if a blogger in Australia threatens a blogger in the UK? What if they make the threat in the comments section of an American blog? Supposing that sufficient evidence can be gathered, can it be brought to court, and if so in what country? It’s these gaping legal issues that make it so easy to post anonymous stuff online.

Limited To Bloggers – What’s That About?
I don’t understand why a code of conduct applies ONLY to bloggers. Bloggers only form a small part of the fabric of the Internet. What about forums, social networking sites and good old-fashioned email? I’m sure there are other methods of interaction that don’t necessarily involve bloggers.

Maybe I’m being too cynical about Tim’s intentions, but this looks like an ill-conceived bit of bandwagon-hopping. As Darren said, the principles resonate with me, but I can’t see myself signing up to principles that cannot be universally upheld.

I heard the phrase “like herding cats” for the first time last week – I think it’s particularly appropriate for this situation.

The person behind WordPress is Matt Mullenweg. He mentioned on his blog this evening that he’d recently done an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald.

If you’re not familiar with Matt’s work, I suggest you give it a read. It’s easy to forget some of the amazing developments Matt’s had a hand in over the last few years:

1. He started up the WordPress project and turned it into possibly the most popular blogging platform on the planet. I would say that it’s the tool used by most serious bloggers out there today.
2. Along with Dougal Campbell, he developed “Ping-O-Matic, a tool that notifies search engines of blog updates.” This is a crucial component of what I cringingly call the blogosphere. It allows services like Technorati to know about new content on a website rather than having to crawl it periodically to discover it.
3. He’s been involved with the group that pioneered Microformats (I’ll write about these another time!).
4. As co-creator of Akismet, not only does he provide the best blogging software, but he helps prevent comment spam from making blogging a nightmare!

I’m writing this post for a couple of reasons. a) I was stunned at how much work this guy has done to advance blogging, b) I’m convinced he’s going to revolutionize blogging yet again, and c) I owe the guy a big thank you.

The thank you, Matt is for providing such a life-altering piece of software for free. Blogging provides people with a new means of connecting with a potentially limitless audience, allows them to clarify their thoughts and feelings in words and allows the professional bloggers among us to make a decent (some would say indecent) living! And having tried some of the alternatives, I honestly believe WordPress is synonymous with blogging.

So there you go.

Alister Cameron agrees, and he recently discovered a new plugin for WordPress that automatically thanks first time commenters by email. The plugin is called Comment Relish and was developed by Justin Shattuck.

The plugin allows you to send a configurable email to any new commenter on your blog, thanking them for their comment. It’s a small courtesy, but it makes people feel valued that you took the time to thank them.

Alister identified a few shortcomings with the original plugin, though and made a few changes that allow him to manually oversee the process:

• I dont want the email going directly to the commenter. I want the email sent to me, so I can check the wording, any weirdnesses (like changing the greeting from Hi Darren Jones back to just Hi Darren), and so I can add my own words to the template if their comment warrants it. Sometimes people also make obvious email address typos and I can check for these, this way.
• I dont want a comment sent the moment they submit the comment. Thats not natural. By sending me an email, a more organic and natural exchange occurs. It may be hours before I see that email to adjust it and pass it on, but thats more real to me.

That’s a sweet touch. With a bit more work, Justin (or Alister) could customise the plugin to have it’s own moderation panel in WordPress so that emails could be queued there for review and modification before being sent directly from the panel. That would reduce the need for Alister to route the emails to himself, and would also provide for a more natural delay in sending.

Of course, with my interest being primarily in web design, search engine optimisation and all that malarkey, I ended up writing semi-regularly to Interweb and neglecting the blog here at Scribble Designs.

Why was this a mistake?

Several reasons:

• The tech blogging market is severely overcrowded, unless you’ve got the time to create something really special.
• Unless you’re a field leader like Darren Rowse, your money making opportunities from a tech blog are severely limited.
• The themes of Scribble and Interweb were similar, yet I was doubling the effort to build content on both blogs instead of making one really great blog.
• Because the blogs were split, I had to market both blogs as well. Double the effort for everything. Leaving comments on other blogs, building backlinks to two blogs instead of one.

It was a blog post by Raj Dash over at Performancing that made me decide to concentrate the two blogs into one. And instead of trying to make money through advertising, I’m hoping the more focussed content here will serve to solidify my experience. It’s not all about Google AdSense, don’t you know!

What this means is that I’ll be slightly redesigning the Scribble Designs site to reflect the kind of work I’ve been doing for the last few years. I’ll be sharing my experiences of things that have worked for me in the past and things that haven’t. And, like my heroes over at SEOmoz, I’ll probably share a little more information than is commercially viable for a web designer!