You should read spam and fake blogs, another problem I’ve been seeing a lot lately is entire blogs being scraped and their content being re-published with ads on it. Structured formats like RSS make this easier than before. The dark side to the numbers all the blog search engines have been toting is that a LARGE percentage of these are fake blogs, so much so that I currently block over 80% of all incoming pings to Ping-O-Matic as obvious spam. This has been a huge resource burden as well. We have around 2 million legit pings per day, do the math.

RSS Ping has launched! “RSS Ping combines RSS item metadata with site update information.” Call it Ping 2.0. 😉 See also: David’s post about it.

Standards and CSS in IE 7. No longer an oxymoron! (I know this is old.)

Came across two interesting posts today Trackback spam a nightmare and Fighting Trackback spam. Although I appreciate the praise for all we’ve done thus far in WordPress to address these problems, I think we’ve got a lot left to do and this is still an area of very active development.

It’s official now, the excellent TinyMCE has been integrated into WordPress 1.6. The real test after the search was if I could use it on a day to day basis, even though I normally can’t stand WYSIWYG-type things. With this integration I’ve actually found it more enjoyable to use and the code it produces is top-notch. Of course if you don’t like it, there’s a new checkbox to disable it under Options > Writing.

YAPOMR, or yet another Ping-O-Matic ripoff. I’m seeing at least one of these a week now. “1,004 pings served.” The road from a thousand to 268,879,563 (the current PoM count) is very rough, I wish them the best. Everyone is trying to get in this space now, but each is like an open proxy for ping spammers.

Mac Tips looks clean, has nice content, and runs WordPress. Hat tip: Geof.

Mozilla moves Firefox, other products, under for-profit umbrella, interesting, and ultimately for the better I think.

Textdrive just launched Strongspace, an ultra-secure storage solution.

Sitemeter provides stats for more sites than I could ever count, and their weblog runs WordPress. Hat tip: Richard Eriksson.

The new Dreamhost blog is powered by WordPress, of course. Hat tip: Kathleen.

Binary Book Review — Good to Great, Jim Collins: 1.

Binary Book Review — Selling the Invisible, Harry Beckwith: 1.

Binary Book Review — The Origin of Brands, Al Ries and Laura Ries: 0.

I’m going to be in Dallas this weekend for a wedding, any suggestions for things to do when I’m in town, besides avoiding melting from the TX heat?

Jason on doing what you love and loving what you do. I often disagree with Calacanis, but when he’s right he’s spot on.

At Gnomedex John Furrier interviewed me and the results are now online, John was a lot of fun to chat with. I hope we do it again sometime. PodTech.net is one of my favorite podcast sites.