Joel on Software: Something Rotten in AdSense

And while we’re on abuse of Google: Joel on AdSense click fraud, speculating that AdSense scammers use virus-infected zombie PCs to click links. (A nice blast-from-the-past mention of AllAdvantage, too; I remember them, and their free money, well.)

Niall Kennedy's Weblog: Google spam suite primer

Technorati’s Niall Kennedy walks through the ways Google’s tools are used to facilitate blog spam.

The Register: How ATM fraud nearly brought down British banking

Fascinating, and chilling; a cut above the Reg’s usual journalism.

Lost Remote: LR guide to the new newswriting

Tongue-in-cheek, but all too true; I recognise a lot of these. (via TV Squad.)

Squawks of the Parrot: The Parrot post-mortem

Dan Sugalski’s post-mortem of his tenure on the Parrot project: a fascinating insight into how technology-driven open-source projects run.

SiliconValleyWatcher: Let's kill the sacred cow of "Community"

“Commercial interests love online communities, because they are an aggregated blob into which you can more cheaply throw marketing messages.” (via Jeremy Zawodny)

Ask MetaFilter: Dyeing my white cat festive colors for special occasions: sick and/or dangerous?

I like the first answer best: “Obnoxious.” (I’m mildly fascinated by MeFi, but not quite enough to pony up the $5 that’d let me comment there…)

Joel on Software: Architecture Astronauts Are Back

“When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.” (See also Burningbird: “We’ve been through this before, and we know what’s going to follow. Frankly, we’re a little peeved that people think we’re so daft as to forget what happened just a few short years ago.”)

plasticbag.org: America vs. the Congestion Charge...

Lovely little story from Tom Coates: the American Embassy in London—an institution with which I have some familiarity—is proudly squirming out of paying congestion charges for its staff's journeys; an act which Tom believes isn’t going down well with everyday Londoners. “There's nothing the British like more than a nice bureaucratic pot-boiler combined with a bit of culture clashing and grumpiness about uncouth people not pulling their weight.” (Personally, I think they should pay, if nothing else than as compensation for blighting Grosvenor Square with their butt-ugly building and its rings of security fences and concrete barriers…)

Blogger Buzz: On Spam

Blogger on the weekend’s spam-storm-in-the-A-list-teacup. Also: CAPTCHAs on posting if their classifier identifies you as “spammy”.

CNN.com: Clarke ousted from Tory leader race

When spellcheckers attack: “Clarke’s age probably counted against him, as did his pro-European views in an overwhelmingly eurosceptic neuroscientist party.”

Allied: Below Whose Radar Screen?

Jeneane pushes back against the ghettoization of BlogSpot: “The opinion among the big guys is that blogspot squatters are the undesirables of the net.”

Sifry's Alerts: State of the Blogosphere, October 2005 Part 1

Dave Sifry, at Technorati, takes the opposite stance: spam isn’t a huge problem overall; the current attack generated a lot of noise because it affected the A-lister’s ego searches.

Blog Maverick: Get Your Blogspot Shit Together Google

Mark Cuban takes the nuclear option: Icerocket (temporarily) stops indexing BlogSpot blogs.

Chris Pirillo: Kill Blogspot Already!

“It may have been a smart acquisition in the beginning, but y’all need to clean house in a big way. You’re the tallest nail, and you’re really getting pounded - and now others, who aren’t even using your service, are getting pounded. Blogspot has become nothing but a crapfarm, and your brand is going to go down with it.”

A Whole Lotta Nothing: When it rains, it pours

Spam blogging ramps up; and BlogSpot, yet again, is the vector of choice. Tim Bray: “I think we have an emergency on our hands.” Dave Winer:“Links are now devalued. PageRank is under attack and the attackers are winning.”

Business Blog Consulting: A "Sniff Test" for the Overly Company-Focused Blog

Stephan Spencer on the Google Blog: “the official blog has its face to the company, and consequently its butt to the reader”—an assertion he backs up with an analysis of its use of the corporate “we”. (via Jeremy Zawodny, who’s probably pleased that the Yahoo Search Blog came out better…)

SFGate.com: Woman on motorcycle collides with bear

It’s not funny, really, but somehow the final sentence of this story really tickles me…

Open Source Development with CVS

CVS reading, redux.

Version Management with CVS

“The Cederqvist”: the “official” manual for CVS. I suspect I’m going to have to spend some time reading this. And I never realised how much I’d miss Continuus—or Synergy/CM, as it’s now even more blandly named…

Tea Leaves: Somebody Save Me

peterb’s continuing rage against the tyranny of the save point: “Hardcore players have been trained to put up with all sorts of stupid behavior from their games.”

BBC NEWS: Fire hits Wallace and Gromit sets

Aw bugger again: all Aardman’s archives destroyed.

Spelling and Pictures and Twain at Dinner

Mark Twain, at the annual dinner of the Associated Press in 1906: “By hard honest labor I’ve dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down until the average is three letters and a half. […] I am careful, I am economical of my time and labor. For the family’s sake I've got to be so. So I never write ‘metropolis’ for 7 cents, because I can get the same money for ‘city.’ I never write ‘policeman,’ because I can get the same price for ‘cop.’ And so on and so on. I never write ‘valetudinarian’ at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for 7 cents; I wouldn't do it for 15.”

Guardian Unlimited: A month in Tescoland

A good story idea in principle; but in practice, it gets buried under Lucy Mangan’s privileged Waitrose-and-farmers’-market sniffiness. (And is it just me, or is this some terribly overblown writing? Every paragraph is overloaded with alliteration, clichés, flowery adjectives, and ten-dollar words: it’s tiring to read.)

BBC NEWS: Comedy legend Ronnie Barker dies

Aw, bugger. He was always by far the funniest Ronnie.