I started blogging back in October 2003. Back then, I used a blogging software program called iBlog that created blog pages in plain old HTML. It worked okay but I soon outgrew it and switched to WordPress.

The trouble is, I used iBlog for more than two years, accumulating hundreds of posts. Although I was able to export those posts to XML, getting them properly formatted with their images and importing them into WordPress was extremely tedious and time-consuming. I worked on it periodically for months. And then I gave up.

This week, I’m prepping for a new book based on a collection of my blog posts. I realized that the best way to make sure I didn’t miss any of them was to get them all online on An Eclectic Mind. So I sat down and completed the tedious chore of importing the last bunch of posts, all of which have lots of photos and date from January 2004 to June 2005.

Here’s a list of what I added:

• On Close Calls
  Why a control tower clearance is something to be taken with a grain of salt. October 9, 2004
• Through the Magic of Photoshop…
  I get a photographic image of a helicopter that hasn’t been built yet. November 7, 2004
• A Trip to California
  I take a trip to California with my family to see Zero-Mike-Lima. November 24, 2004
• People are Pigs
  A tenant moves out and I am amazed by the way some people live. December 2, 2004
• A Trip to Quartzsite
  I have a nice flight to Quartzsite and back with some pilot friends. January 17, 2005
• Air-to-Air
  An air-to-air photo shoot gives mixed results. January 24, 2005
• Exploring the Desert by Helicopter
  We wander through a mill site, fly over an open pit mine, get a hamburger in the middle of nowhere, and see the “land now” light four miles short of home. February 5, 2005
• A Trip to Phantom Ranch
  We take a mule ride to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, spend two nights, and return to civilization. March 5, 2005
• My Trip to Georgetown
  I take Zero-Mike-Lima on a long cross country trip to take care of business and visit some friends. May 8, 2005
• Red Mountain
  We “walk inside a mountain” near Flagstaff. June 1, 2005
• Could it be? A building at our place on Howard Mesa?
  Our soon-to-be cabin was finally delivered to Howard Mesa. June 5, 2005

I might not be the most influential blogger you’ve ever heard of — if you’ve heard of me at all. Or the most prolific. But I’m probably one of the most experienced: I’ve been blogging since October 15, 2003.

Still, I was extremely pleased to be asked to join a panel of expert bloggers for a recent WordCast podcast about blogging productivity. The folks at WordCast asked me to follow-up with a blog post sharing some of my tips. I can’t help thinking that my co-panelist’s tips were better, but here’s what I have to offer.

1. Create and Stick to a Blogging Schedule

One of the most important things about keeping a blog is adding new content regularly. “Regularly” is a tricky word. It doesn’t have to mean every day. It just means often enough to keep your readers checking in for more.

For example, suppose your life gives you enough free time that you can post once or twice a day for a few weeks or months. Suddenly, however, life takes as turn and that blogging time is gone — or you get bored with your blog and put it on the back burner. Go a week without posting something new and the folks who check in regularly for your words of wisdom may stop checking.

While I realize this is an extreme example, it does illustrate my point: regular readers will pick up on the rhythm on your posting and expect you to stick with it. When you don’t, they move on.

The way to prevent this from happening is to create a posting goal and schedule time to write. Perhaps you think twice a week is a good frequency. Pick two days a week — Tuesday and Friday? — pick a time that works for you — at breakfast with your morning coffee? — and blog on schedule. Make it part of your routine, part of your life.

I try to get a new blog post out at least five days a week. My schedule has me sitting in front of my laptop with my morning coffee every morning I can. Since I’m an early riser — usually up by 6 AM — I usually get my blog post done before I start my work day.

Got something coming up that’s likely to break your schedule? Vacation? Business trip? Family commitments? Write extra posts when you can and schedule them to appear in the future. This is particularly handy if your topic is not time-sensitive or you know you’ll be unable to blog on schedule in the future. Here are two suggestions:

• Long posts can often be cut it into multiple parts with each part scheduled to appear on a different day. Not only does this stretch a single work out to fill a posting schedule, but if done properly, your readers will make sure they come back for the subsequent parts.
• Do double-duty and write two posts at a sitting, scheduling one of them to appear in the future. If you’re able to write a lot very quickly, you can actually write a week’s worth of content at one sitting. No one has to know that each day’s new post was actually written some time ago.

2. Take Notes

How do you know what to blog about? One way is to take notes. As ideas and thoughts come to you — either from the workings of your own mind or from something you read online or heard in a conversation — jot them down. If you spend enough time thinking and reading and listening, you should be able to accumulate plenty of ideas.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t use software or web-based tools such as Evernote to organize notes and clippings. I use paper. I keep spiral-bound notebooks on my desk and in my computer bag and make notes as things come to me. When I’ve processed the note — blogged about it, made the call, tracked down the Web site, ordered the product, etc. — I recycle the paper. The huge file containing all my thoughts and ideas is my blog.

The point is, it doesn’t matter how you take notes. The important thing is to take them. Keep track of the little ideas that pop into your head when you’re in the shower or driving. Write down the key words of a conversation that’ll help you remember what you found so intriguing. Then, when you’re ready to compose a blog post, you’ll have most of the material you need to get it written.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not knocking software tools. I just can’t be bothered climbing up the learning curve to use them effectively. Pen and paper works for me.

3. Automate!

There are lots of software tools and solutions out there to help automate tasks. After all, isn’t that what computers are for? To do the work and make our lives easier?

Here are three examples of tools I use to automate blogging-related tasks:

• Delicious with Postalicious. Delicious is a bookmarking Web site. You read a Web page, want to remember it, and create a Delicious bookmark with its URL and a description and tags you specify. I’ve been using Delicious for years, since it could be found only at http://del.icio.us. Postalicious is a WordPress plugin that creates a blog post based on your new Delicious entries and the descriptions you provide. It then automatically posts the links entry to your blog at a predetermined time. You can find plenty of examples on my blog. Postalicious also works with other services, such as ma.gnolia, Google Reader, Reddit, or Yahoo Pipes. I rely on this combination of tools to collect and share Web-based content that I found interesting and want to share with my readers. The format isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly good enough for my needs. Oh, and one more thing: I use the RSS feed for my Delicious bookmarks to generate a list of recently bookmarked pages in the sidebar of my blog.
• Twitterfeed with Twitter. Twitter is an incredible tool for communicating short snippets of information with other people all over the world. (If you haven’t heard of it or tried it, crawl out from under that rock, brush the dust and cobwebs off your clothes, and join the rest of the social networking community.) Twitterfeed is a Web-based service that scans your blog’s RSS feed and tweets links to your new posts. This is a great, automatic way to tell your Twitter followers about new content on your blog.
• Feedburner’s Email Subscriptions. Feedburner is a service that modifies your RSS feed to add features. Although it was started as an independent service, it’s now part of Google, so you need a free Google account to take advantage of its features. The Email Subscriptions feature creates e-mail messages based on your RSS feed and sends them out to subscribers. The subscription list is maintained inside Feedburner, so you don’t have to deal with it; users can add and remove themselves without bothering you. This is a great way for folks who want to read your content regularly to get it on a timely basis without using RSS readers. Best of all, once you set it up, it’s automatic.

Conclusion

When thinking about blog productivity, it all comes down to working smart. Make blogging part of your life schedule. Keep notes about the topics you find interesting so you have plenty of topics to write about when you’re ready to blog. And automate tasks whenever possible.

These are just three tips. Give it some thought — or read the blog posts of my co-panelists here — for more.

About the Author

Maria Langer is a freelance writer who has been writing about computers and the Internet since 1990. She’s the co-author of the first-ever book on WordPress and has since authored three WordPress video titles for Lynda.com. Maria’s also a commercial helicopter pilot and serious amateur photographer. Her blog, An Eclectic Mind, can be found at MariaLanger.com.

This morning, as I sat drinking my coffee, I began my usual ritual of checking out some of the links tweeted overnight by the people I follow. One of them was about the iPad. Interested in the iPad as my future ebook reader, I followed the link.

I wound up on a blog post that consisted primarily of screenshots of Twitter. The blogger had posted a question on Twitter about the iPad and then sat back and captured screenshots of the responses as they were tweeted.

I call that lazy blogging.

It was also extremely tedious to read. So tedious, in fact, that I stopped reading after the first scroll down. I did continue scrolling to see if there was some content added by the blogger, but there was so little of it that I wound up simply closing the browser window and getting on with my day.

And then I realized how much it bugged me that there was someone out there passing off screenshots of Twitter responses as a blog “post.”

There is so much crap on the Internet today. Huge quantities of it. I don’t “surf” the net. My Web activity is limited to looking up things I need to know about and following what appears to be interesting links that I receive from friends and business associates verbally, via e-mail, and via Twitter. I don’t want to spend my day wading through the crap online. I want the good stuff.

A blogger should not simply regurgitate what’s readily available on the Web. If I wanted to know what Twitter users thought of the iPad, I’d use Twitter’s built-in search feature — which is also part of Nambu, my preferred Twitter client — and set up a search. I’d then read the results myself. I don’t need to go to a blog to read the same stuff. As screenshots, for Pete’s sake! Hell, if I were at home with my miserably slow Internet connection, the damn page would have taken five minutes to load!

A blogger’s job is to both inform and provide analysis. A summary sentence at the top of 20 screenshots that simply says, “Many people think lack of multi-tasking is a deal breaker,” doesn’t do much for me. And I certainly don’t need to see those 20 screenshots. I get it. You’re not making this up. All these Twitter users said it. I guess it must be true.

And it’s immensely ironic that this post was retweeted. As if it had value. WTF?

My point: if you call yourself a blogger and want to add something of value to the Web, dust off your keyboard and use it.

Yesterday, I was one of four guest panelists on the WordCast podcast. The topic was blog productivity — tips and tricks for blogging more efficiently — and a phrase I’d never heard before came up in the discussion: power blogger.

Let me take a few steps back before I move forward. Although I’ve written extensively about blogging from the blogger point of view and I’ve also co-authored and authored various WordPress training materials (books and videos), I’m not someone who keeps up-to-date with the world of blogging. I don’t know the buzzwords or phrases, I don’t follow the hot trends. I just obtain the tools, use them the way they work for me, and try to publish new blog posts regularly. Along the way, I provide a sprinkling of advice for bloggers in my own blog posts.

So the phrase power blogger was brand new to me.

And meaningless.

When the question, “What advice can you give to people who want to become power bloggers?” came up, I felt a tingling of stage fright. Surely I’d sound like an idiot if I admitted I had no idea what the phrase meant.

Fortunately, another panelist spoke up. I listened carefully to glean meaning from his response. And what I learned was that he — and the others — considered the quantity of blog posts a major component of power blogging. By their definition — at least one post a day — I was a power blogger!

I sure don’t feel like one.

When it was my turn to speak, I proposed my own definition of power blogger. I don’t remember the exact words, but it went something like this:

The number of blog posts a blogger publishes should have nothing to do with whether he’s a power blogger. Instead, it should be the influence the blogger has over his readership and beyond. What’s important is whether a blog post makes a difference in the reader’s life. Does it teach? Make the reader think? Influence his decisions? If a blogger can consistently do any of that, he’s a power blogger.

I recall comparing Twitter — which is, after all, “microblogging” — to blogging. Someone can tweet dozens of times a day, but if there isn’t any value in what he’s tweeting, what good is it? There are plenty of bloggers out there simply rehashing the same material, over and over, without adding anything new to the mix. They might post five or ten times a day. But if it isn’t worth reading, how can you consider them power bloggers?

And I guess that’s the advice I want to share in this post: If you’re serious about blogging, don’t go for quantity. Go for quality.

Make a difference with what you post.

About a year and a half ago, I discovered the Monotone theme for WordPress. Monotone is a unique theme in that it can “see” the colors in a photo, choose one, and use that color as a background. The results can be quite spectacular when used as a theme for a photo blog.

Indeed, the theme is designed for just that. It’s minimalistic and doesn’t even support WordPress widgets. It showcases the photo, which it protects from right-click saving, and offers room beneath it for a description. There’s also the usual post date, category, and tags, as well as big navigation buttons. Navigation can also be achieved by clicking the left or right side of the image.

Back in the summer of 2008, I put quite a few images online in a photo blog called Maria’s Pix that I created with Monotone. But then I discovered Zenfolio as a gallery/selling tool and simply stopped posting new photos. The site languished, unchanged, for over a year. It even became inaccessible as my ISP changed my DNS record and I didn’t update the subdomain to the new IP address.

But yesterday I decided to revive Maria’s Pix, partly as an experiment to see if I could do what so many photographers — amateur and professional — try to do: post a photo a day.

While updating the blog to prepare it for its re-unveiling, I discovered another theme by the same theme author, Duotone. Like Monotone, Duotone matches photo colors. But it goes a step further by taking a second color and using it as a page background, thus eliminating the unimpressive white background found in Monotone. I downloaded it, installed it, and activated it.

And found that it displayed PHP errors instead of photos.

Apparently there’s an incompatibility between Duotone and WordPress 2.9, which is the latest version (as I write this). While some folks more knowledgeable about PHP than I’ll ever be offered some hacks to fix the problem, the only thing the hacks did for me was remove the errors. The pictures did not appear.

I switched back to Monotone.

Eventually, Duotone will be fixed and I’ll begin using it. I like it because it supports widgets, so I can add a bit of other information under the photo. I believe it reads EXIF info, too, so I won’t have to manually insert photo info. We’ll see.

Until then, I hope you’ll visit Maria’s Pix — at least once in a while — to see a few of my better photos.

Over the years, I’ve posted almost daily lists of links to articles I’ve read on the Web that I think blog readers might enjoy. They come under the main title of “Interesting Links” and include the date on which I found them. Clicking the “links” tag in the sidebar will display them all, in reverse chronological order.

It might surprise some people to learn that this is mostly automated. I simply bookmark the page I want to share with Delicious. Each night, a plugin on my WordPress blog, checks in to see what links have been added. It publishes the day’s list as a blog post at around 11 PM.

That would explain why an “interesting links” page might contain a single link; I only bookmarked one link that day.

What I like about this solution (other than the automation, of course) is that it enables me to determine exactly what I want the post link to say and include a description of the post.

Some of you may have noticed that these posts stopped appearing at the beginning of December. The truth of the matter is that I simply stopped bookmarking links. I got busy and traveled around, mostly between Wickenburg and Phoenix. I stopped following Twitter — which is a great source of links to interesting information — so closely. And, frankly, I got lazy. When I found an interesting page, I didn’t bother to bookmark it. Maybe I realized that it might be the only link I bookmarked that day and I didn’t want it to be all alone in its blog post.

But I’ve started bookmarking again and hope to continue to share the best content I find on the Web — usually with the help of some Twitter friends.

And I’ll do it legally, by offering just a description and link, rather than a word-for-word reproduction of what I find. (More on slimebags who do that in another post.)

This morning, I got a junk e-mail message from a blogger I’d met on Twitter. And I’m pissed off about it.

How I Was Violated and What I Did about It

I followed this guy on Twitter for a short time and wound up on his blog, where I posted a comment. As anyone who comments on blogs knows, an e-mail address is required to comment, so I entered mine, as I’ve been doing without problems (or spam) for the past five or so years.

This blogger, however, was different. He evidently harvests the e-mail addresses from blog comments and uses it to feed his self-promotional e-mail list. The spam e-mail message from him arrived this morning when I collected my e-mail.

To say I was furious is an understatement. In my opinion, this blogger has violated my trust — and likely the trust of all other commenters on his blog. He’s used my e-mail address without my permission in a way that’s unacceptable. He’s a spammer, pure and simple, and should be subject to the same penalties as any other spammer.

(As if anyone’s actually enforcing the new anti-spam laws.)

Here’s the message he sent; I XXXed out the identifying information so I don’t send any customers his way:

Did you enjoy the free video on the 6 ways to make money on the internet?

How would you like to win the entire XXX System absolutely free?

All you have to do is recommend the system to a friend via a twitter to enter.

We will be giving away 20 full XXX system accounts between now and January 20th.

Click here to enter!

XXX Media Group | XXX | Lincoln, NE 68516 | US
Unsubscribe from future marketing messages from XXX Media Group

Call me an idiot, but I clicked the unsubscribe link. (They say that doing that often just confirms your address and spreads it.) The link sent me to the Bronto Web site, which is evidently the software this jerk uses to send his spam. It supposedly unsubscribed me. But it went a step further — it offered a complaint link. So I clicked that and filled out the form.

I also forwarded the message to spam@uce.gov, which is something I’ll be doing with ALL spam I receive from now on.

Then I went to Twitter and reported the jerk as a spammer there.

Why This Hurts Legitimate Bloggers

I’ve been blogging since October 2003. That’s six years now. My blog has accumulated thousands of comments from readers. All of them entered what looks like legitimate e-mail addresses. Are they? I don’t know. Other than a few notable exceptions when I wanted to network with a specific person — Miraz Jordan, who wound up co-authoring a book with me, comes to mind — I haven’t tried using them.

I don’t spam my commenters. I appreciate their input; they make my blog better. Why would I violate their trust and start spamming them via e-mail? Why would I make them less likely to contribute their comments to my blog?

So you can get an idea of how annoyed I am about this asshole.

Imagine a first-time commenter who happens to comment on this jerk’s blog. He feels good about adding to the conversation and is ready to do it again elsewhere. But then he gets spam from this jerk. He realizes that putting his e-mail address out there on the Internet can get him all kinds of spam. So he doesn’t do it. Maybe he starts putting fake e-mail addresses in his comments — making him impossible to contact if the blogger wants to for a legitimate, non-spam reason. Or maybe he simply stops commenting at all.

All because one jerk is harvesting commenter e-mail for spam purposes.

What You Can Do about It

The best thing anyone can do about spam is to report it to the authorities.

If you receive spam on Twitter, use the Report For Spam link on the user’s profile page. Do it every time you receive Twitter spam.

If you receive e-mail spam, forward it to spam@uce.gov. You can also visit the FTC’s Spam Site to learn more about how you can reduce the amount of spam you get. And while you’re surfing out on Government sites, visit OnGuard Online for real information about how to protect yourself and your computer from Internet fraud.

But whatever you do, don’t stop commenting on blogs. Most bloggers appreciate your contributions and won’t betray your trust.

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time reading old blog entries as part of the process of adding excerpts that would appear in search results.

And now I must go off on a tangent to explain why….

On Tags and Excerpts

A few weeks ago, I added a feature to this blog that would list related posts at the end of each post when viewed in single page view. (If you don’t see what I’m talking about at the end of this post, click the title of this post to switch to single page view and you’ll see it.) This feature uses the tag feature of WordPress to match the current post’s tags to other posts in this blog. The posts with the most tag matches are listed as related. Makes sense to me and it actually works pretty well if all the posts are properly tagged. I set this up so it displays an excerpt after the post title. I tend to use vague titles in many of my posts — a blogging no-no, I know — so the excerpt helps readers get a better idea of what the post is about.

The trouble is, if I don’t create a custom excerpt, WordPress uses the first bunch of words — 50, I think — as the excerpt. This is not satisfactory. So I need to go through all those old posts and update them so they have excerpts. While I’m at it, I’m also updating the tags.

And, of course, I’m reading a lot of those old posts.

Why This Blog Exists

This blog has been around since October 2003 — six years this month. As I’ve explained elsewhere on this blog, I embraced the idea of blogging early on. I’d always wanted to keep a journal of the things going on in my life and blogging seemed the way to do it. Rather than rely on myself to keep a diary or journal that only I read, I could put a lot of my thoughts and experiences on the Web where others could read about them. Their comments and other means of interaction could help me understand other points of view and grow as an individual.

Sounds silly and idealistic? I don’t think so. I’ve met a lot of people through blogging — people I’ve become friends with. Miraz, for example, co-authored a book about WordPress with me a few years back after we met on my blog. Ann flew with me once and has introduced me to other people after finding me on another site I manage, wickenburg-az.com. There are other folks who have connected with me through my blog. They’ve all made my life richer and have given me good reason to continue blogging.

So, with 1,910 blog posts on this site and another 100 or so in the archives still waiting to be imported (long story), I’ve built quite a journal with plenty to look back on.

I do want to mention here that I’ve had a personal Web site since 1994. This blog is simply the current incarnation of it.

Back to My Original Train of Thought

So, as I was saying, yesterday I spent a lot of time reading old blog entries. It reminded me why I started this blog — as a journal of my life. So it makes sense to journalize my NaNoWriMo ‘09 experience as it happens.

I announced that I was thinking of participating in NaNoWriMo this year in a blog post yesterday. I’d actually written the post the night before, but the Internet went down (as it often does in Wickenburg) and I wound up posting it the next day. That was a big step for me. Although I didn’t say for sure that I was going to participate, publicly suggesting that I might was enough to get me thinking very seriously about it.

And if I move forward — which I expect I will — I thought I’d journalize the process for future reference.

Just Say No to Forums

I don’t think the digital ink had dried on that blog post when I got my first query from a Twitter friend:

so whats your userid on NanoWriMo ? you can probably guess mine

I could guess his, but I won’t share it here. My response was this:

I will not be participating on the NaNoWriMo Web site or forums. I don’t see any benefit.

My advice: When you’re ready to start writing, stop goofing off on the NaNoWriMo site. You can’t get work done there.

Indeed, I’d checked out the NaNoWriMo site back in 2005 when I’d first heard of NaNoWriMo. I was appalled. The site seemed to exist primarily to raise money — $110,000 — to build libraries in Laos. It was heavy on the NaNoWriMo-branded merchandise and requests for donations. Someone was obviously making money — possibly lots of it. It really irks me when I see people or organizations preying on wannabe writers.

The forums were full of NaNoWriMo participants chatting about writing or not writing. It seemed to be an extraordinary waste of time. Why would you spend any time participating in a forum when you could be spending that time actually writing?

Remember, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel-length work. I think the number of words tossed around is 50,000. With 30 days in November, that’s nearly 1,700 words a day every day for an entire month. Miss a few days and that number rises dramatically.

It seems to me that a serious author should be more focused on the writing task, not the socialization aspects of yet another writer’s forum.

Another Twitter follower had this to say about the forums:

lol maybe not but its addicting – as is twitter this year for me. :p It’s good advice though

I replied:

I haven’t checked it out this year. I was turned off last time I was there. Lots of people chatting, no one writing.

She replied:

Hmm… well that’s what the forums are for. You write the novel in your own time. For me the forums are a break during writing.

I’m afraid I let my cynicism get the best of me in my response to that:

If I need a break from writing, the last thing I want to do is visit a forum full of people whining about writing. IMHO.

I later pointed out the fact that I’m a cynic and linked to my first blog post about NaNoWriMo back in 2005.

What I also should have linked to is one of my more popular posts, “Why Forums Suck.” I think it pretty much covers my opinions on forums in general. Although a well-moderated forum can be an incredibly useful tool for getting and sharing information, the vast majority of forums have a signal to noise ratio that’s just too low to be worth wasting time on.

And I’ll go back to my original point: why participate in a forum if you can spend your energy writing the actual novel?

The way I see it, the NaNoWriMo forums may have value now, before the month begins. But come November 1, the serious writers should pretty much abandon it and get to work.

100 Monkeys?

I’ll step out on the line one more time here to remind folks that the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a complete novel. That means it needs a beginning, middle, and end. It needs character development. It needs plot and subplots and underlying themes. It needs dialog and description. It needs to create loose ends and tie them all up before the last page. It needs to be compelling so someone will want to read it and written in good English (or whatever language you prefer) so someone can read it.

When you write a novel, you’re telling a story.

What I took away from my NaNoWriMo non-experience back in 2005 was that people seemed to think it was more important to get the 50,000 words out than to actually write a coherent piece of literature. Even one of my Twitter friends this year gave me this impression when he wrote:

Doubt I’ll make anywhere near the 50,000 words.. real life will get in the way

It’s not the word count that matters as much as whether the entire work holds together as a novel.

100 monkeys with typewriters can churn out 50,000 words of text in a month. If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo, don’t be a monkey.

On Life Getting in the Way

The above quote brings up another topic for consideration: the responsibilities of life preventing you from completing a NaNoWriMo project.

The main reason I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo is because of work and related responsibilities. I write for a living. The last thing I want to do at the end of a day full of writing step-by-step instructions for completing a mail merge with Word (for example) is spend any more time in front of a computer, writing.

I also travel extensively and, when I do, I have numerous responsibilities for either getting work done or seeing to the safety and comfort of passengers. Clearly, NaNoWriMo would interfere with my ability to perform while on the road.

Notice that I said that NaNoWriMo would interfere — not that my work would interfere with NaNoWriMo. That’s because if I participate in NaNoWriMo, it will become a priority in my life. That’s not to say I won’t do anything else — I do have other priorities. It just means that I won’t let life get in the way (if I can help it).

Isn’t that the point of NaNoWriMo? To force you to finish the novel in a month? To make time for it? To make it happen?

And this goes back to something I said back in 2005: You cannot write a novel without the complete support of your significant other or family. Fortunately, NaNoWriMo makes this easy. After all, you only need their support for a month.

More Coming

I think I’ve written enough about this for today, so I’ll stop here. Tomorrow, I’ll get specific about what I’m doing to prepare for NaNoWriMo.

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? Let us know by sharing your comments — and perhaps a link to your own journal — here.

I wanted to take a moment to assure readers that I’m still among the living. I’ve just been very busy traveling, spending most of each day on the road and making overnight stops where Internet access is just not an option.

I hope to be able to put out a new blog post about my travels, as well as some photos, later today.

Stay tuned.

A while back, I read a blog post on Pilot Mike’s Weblog titled “Purchase vs. Rent Robinson R22?.” In it, Mike discussed his thoughts about buying an R22 to do his training in.

While I didn’t buy a helicopter to do my primary training, I did buy one for my commercial training. It would have saved me a lot of money if my flight school didn’t charge $75/hour for the CFI to train me. (Yes, they ripped me off. Yes, I know it now and suspected it then. There were extenuating circumstances. I no longer do business with that organization or recommend them to anyone else. I’m not the only one they’ve burned like this. ‘Nuff said.) As it was, I probably saved $25/hour on dual time and $100 hour on solo time. Of course, I used the money save to actually pay for the helicopter and its related expenses, so you can easily argue that I didn’t save anything at all. Still, I wound up with my own helicopter, which I could use as I liked 24/7/356. That’s got to be worth something.

I made a comment on the blog post back in late May 2009 with some of this information. In it, I mentioned my old R22, which is for sale again. I also subscribed to the comment so I could be notified if there were any follow-up comments. (This is a great thing to do if you’re interested in a topic and want to stay involved.) Yesterday, I got an e-mail message from the blog with the contents of the first follow-up comment:

My brother is buying a R22…
I would like to contact Maria

Since the comment included the e-mail address of the commenter, I replied directly to it. After all, there’s no reason why our personal conversation should appear on Mike’s blog. So I wrote:

I should probably start out by clarifying — I’m not selling my old R22. I don’t own it. The guy who bought it from me is selling it. It’s listed on Trade-a-Plane.

If there’s anything else you have question about, let me know. Just keep in mind that I haven’t owned or flown an R22 since 2004, so I might not be able to answer your questions.

He replied quickly in an e-mail I received on my BlackBerry while out for a bike ride. Apparently, he had more than just a question:

Thank you so much for replying.
I have 0 (zero) knowledge about it, and my brother is going to ask me to buy a new one probably next week. I would like to pay for a trusted help/advise OUTSIDE dealers or any other info from a seller.

There is so much wrong with his statement that I don’t even know where to start.

First of all, he must be a good brother to simply buy a helicopter when his brother asks him to. I know what my helicopters cost and I know what even the least expensive ones are going for on Trade-A-Plane. He’s not going to touch anything worth flying for less than $75K. A “new” one — if he really means new — will cost $200,000 or more.

Second, who the hell spends that kind of money without doing their homework? And no, hiring someone to do the homework for you isn’t the same as doing it yourself.

Third, he doesn’t even know me! I could be some Internet con artist, trying to pass myself off as a helicopter expert to lure people like him to an inventory controlled by me or an associate.

Fourth, what makes him think I want to be part of his purchase decision…and possibly be held liable if he buys a lemon? By taking money to give him advice, I’m setting myself up for liability if things don’t go right. I don’t want any part of that.

So I wrote back from my BlackBerry:

I’m sorry. I can’t help you.

This morning, from my computer, I added:

I also want to add that anyone who has zero knowledge about an aircraft should not be buying it. Do your homework, don’t pay someone you don’t even know to do it for you.

I haven’t heard back from him. And that’s got me wondering….maybe he was trying to scam me? Maybe the next step was to ask me for my bank information so he could wire me payment before I started consulting with him?

Or maybe he’s just an idiot who is too damn lazy to do his own research.

I thought I’d try something new this month — a blog post that features excellent comments from blog readers. These are comments that really add something to the blog — or set me straight when I needed it.

You see, a blog is made good, in part, by the comments people share for the blog posts. Oddly, many folks tend to skip over the comments when they read a blog’s post. But in some cases, they’re missing out on some of the best content. My ever-popular post, “The Helicopter Job Market,” is a good example. It has over 100 comments that form an excellent discussion among helicopter pilots. Anyone who reads the post but skips the comments is losing out.

Anyway, I thought I’d highlight some of the best comments that have come in over the past month and include links to both the post and the comment. Here goes.

On July 10 and 11, Mark and Crispian Jago commented on my post, “Some Skeptic Resources on the Web.” Both of them provided links to other podcasts I wasn’t aware of, thus expanding my knowledge of these things.

On July 15, Jodene commented on my post, “Indian Eyes,” which included a video of a weird animated indian face atop a building in Wenatchee. She explained what indian was all about:

There used to be a Skookum apple packing shed where the Office Depot is today. The big Indian with the rotating eyes was their mega-mascot and it became a town mascot as well over the years. I know the shed existed into the late 70’s or early 80’s. I believe when the Skookum shed was torn down and replaced w/ the Office Depot a deal must have been made to keep the sign. (Kind of like the Citgo sign in Boston.)

Rene also provided some information about the Skookum apple packing plant.

On July 17, Jonathan commented on my post, “Please Don’t Drag Me Into Your Life.” The post was a rant and it was very cynical and a bit mean. Jonathan gently pointed out that the person I was criticizing may had a perfectly good excuse to be fully participating in Twitter when her mother might be on her deathbed. He took me down a notch, which I deserved, but he did it in a completely inoffensive way. In part:

I guess there’s an off chance her mother was asleep and this woman couldn’t sleep, but was still at the hospital. So to kill some time she’s surfing around the net maybe? I mean, we’ve all surfed aimlessly in the midnight and early hours right?

Maybe she just needed a relief from all the drama and she was using the net as an outlet….

On July 23, Fred B commented on the post, “Alfalfa Field.” His comment shared a wealth of information about alfalfa production and baling, including a direct reply to another commenter’s question. Here’s part of what he had to say:

Alfalfa is a very productive crop (often yielding 3-4 cuttings a season, and is rich in nutrients). The flip side is that it requires a lot of irrigation and removes a lot of nutrients from the soil. In order to give the soil a break, alfalfa is usually rotated every 5-6 years with a different crop (wheat, red clover, corn, various grasses, etc.), hence the observed switch from wheat to alfalfa. I imagine the owner will stick with the perennial alfalfa crop for a few years now before switching back to wheat….

These aren’t the only comments for this month. There were quite a few more. My post, “Fraud Alert: East Coast Mobile Style” continues to get many hits and comments every week. It’s interesting to read the experiences of the victims and how their credit card companies are (or aren’t) helping them.

I urge regular (and new) readers here to participate by posting comments on posts whenever they have something to add. I’m one person and I don’t know everything. It’s great to get additional information, feedback, and input from readers.

In addition, if you’re really interested in a topic, you can use the check box under your comment to subscribe to future comments. This doesn’t add you to any list I use for anything. It’s all handled internally by a WordPress plugin. There’s no spam. The only time you’ll get e-mail is when there’s a new comment. It’s easy to turn off, too; there are instructions in the e-mail you receive.

In the meantime, if you have any comments about this new feature here, please use the Comment link or form to let me know.

And thanks for helping me make my blog more interesting than I could make it on my own.

If I had to choose between writing blog posts and writing 400+ page books about using computers, I’d take the blog posts any day. They’re shorter — I can knock one off in an hour or less — so I get immediate gratification. They’re also about a wide range of topics I choose to write about, so they can be a lot of fun to write. I can include color photos and other illustrations that don’t require me to set up a computer screen just so and snap a picture. Best of all, I can archive them here in my blog with almost 2,000 others, building a living journal of what’s going on on my life. You don’t know how much I love reading blog posts from the past five years of blogging just to remember what was on my mind back then.

But I’m not blogging much this week. I’m writing something else: a 648-page revision to my Mac OS X Visual QuickStart Guide to cover the features of Snow Leopard.

I’m working my proverbial butt off on this book. 648 pages is a lot of pages. And, as usual, I’m not just writing it but also laying it out, page by page, using InDesign CS4. So I’m sitting in front of my 24″ iMac and my new 13″ MacBook Pro, both of which are set up on the dining table in my camper, typing, mousing, screen-snapping, and Photoshopping my way through the project. I have 4 of the book’s 25 chapters left to churn out — roughly 120 pages. My editors (production and copy) are keeping up with me nicely, so we’re turning around finished chapters at an amazing rate. Even my indexer is hard at work with the first 18 chapters properly numbered and ready to index.

A lot of people think I fly for a living. I don’t. This is what I do for a living. I write books about how to use computers.

Of course, when you do something for a living, that means you get paid to do it. I get advances on the books I write and when they sell a bunch of copies, I get quarterly royalty checks. That’s how I pay my bills and, when my helicopter business isn’t busy enough to pay its bills, my writing work pays its bills, too.

I don’t get paid to blog. And I don’t have blogging deadlines. And my blog will never become a bestseller, featured in the Apple store and on Amazon.com. (Yes, it’s true that the first edition of my Mac OS Visual QuickStart Guide, which covered Mac OS 8, got all the way up to #41 in rank on Amazon.com.) So I set my priorities accordingly and my priorities tell me to get this book off my plate so they’ll send me more money and I can get to work on the two books lined up right behind it.

Yes, you read that right: this is the first of three books I have to revise this summer. The other two, which I’m not at liberty to discuss right now, are also more than 400 pages. Each.

But I thought I’d take a moment to list the blog posts I didn’t write this week:

• Where I was when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. I was almost eight years old and my mother kept me and my six-year-old sister up to watch the activities on television. It was late and I was tired. It was boring. But my mother said that we were watching history. All I can remember is wondering what was taking so long for them to come out and why there was so much beeping in the sound.
• Miscellaneous Political Things. I’m thinking about Sarah Palin, who isn’t a quitter or a dead fish, but gave up mid-term, likely to pursue book and television deals while she’s still hot. I pray she doesn’t try running for president. I’d hate to get a real count of the number of Americans stupid enough to vote for someone who doesn’t know Africa is a continent and thinks living in a state between Canada and Russia gives her foreign policy experience. I’m thinking of Mark Sanford, the South Carolina governor who disappeared off the face of the earth for 5 days without telling anyone where he was going, leaving his state unmanaged so he could pursue an extra-marital affair. I’m thinking of that same guy giving Clinton grief for being serviced by an intern in his office, insisting Clinton resign and now not resigning himself. I’m wondering whether his name will appear beside the word hypocrite in dictionaries or Wikipedia. I’m thinking of the guy who owes him a good dinner (or maybe an all-expense paid trip to Argentina), John Ensign, the Nevada senator who, under threat of blackmail, revealed that he’d had an affair with a member of his staff (no pun intended). A member of a Christian Ministry that calls itself the Promise Keepers, he evidently didn’t think his marriage vows were a promise worth keeping. And I’m thinking of a wise Latina, Sonia Sottomayor, allowing herself to be submitted to the indignity of cross-examination by members of the Republican party trying to make her look hot-headed and unprofessional. They failed because, after all, she is a wise Latina indeed.
• Blessed by Arizona Highways (Again). My phone started ringing this week with more calls for Flying M Air’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure. Someone had written in a blog comment that I was listed on page 29 of “AZ Magazine.” Turns out, the listing is in Arizona HIghways magazine, the same publication that did a 10-page story on my company’s excursions in the May 2009 issue. This time, I’m listed as the “Best Way to See Arizona in a Week” in the August 2009 issue. While I’m thrilled to be getting the additional press, I’m also a bit worried — I didn’t bring enough marketing material with me to send out the info packets that are being requested daily.
• My New Old Mechanic. That would be a brief post about how glad I am that my original R44 helicopter mechanic has left the company he worked for to go solo. His boss wouldn’t let him fix my helicopter because of insurance issues and I wound up with a long line of inferior mechanics. Until recently, of course, when I started getting my annual done up here in Washington state. But now I can use my old mechanic for my 100-hour inspections each winter and feel good about the quality of maintenance.
• An Orchard Party with Three Helicopters. That would be an account of the party my friend Jim and I attended near Othello, WA the other day. I was invited by another cherry pilot I’d met on my blog and was meeting her for the first time. Jim came along. We both flew — in two helicopters. We had great Mexican food, met really nice people, and gave 12 lucky raffle winners helicopter rides around the orchards. We were promised artwork from the kids (hopefully like this piece I received last week after giving a grower’s kids a ride) so maybe I’ll blog about it then.
• The Evolution of Twitter. This would cover my observations of two Twitter accounts I maintain, how I maintain them, and what the results are. I’m pretty sure I’ll write this one sometime this month.
• On Skeptics. Why I’m a skeptic and how it makes me look at the world. I haven’t thought this one out much yet, so I might still write it. I know it needs to be written.

These are only a few topics I didn’t get a chance to write about. And if you know me, you know I’d write a lot more than I’ve written here. But when I get this book done, I have about a week before I need to start the next one. Maybe I’ll churn out some fresh and interesting content then.

Or maybe I’ll get out of this camper and away from my computer and enjoy the area while I’m here.

One of the problems with this blog — at least as far as blogging experts are concerned — is that it covers too many topics. Blogging “experts” agree that to have a “successful” blog, it should concentrate on just one topic. That will attract people interested in that topic and keep them coming back for more, since it’s just what they want. A while back, I tried this by spinning off all the book support blog posts to a separate blog — Maria’s Guides — and leaving the rest behind here. I changed the name of this blog to An Eclectic Mind to help communicate the fact that there’s a lot of topics covered here. I refuse to spin off each major topic to its own blog — at least right now — because there’s so much overlap in the topics and because I simply can’t be bothered managing more than the 5 or so blogs I’m already dealing with. So this blog covers all kinds of things, from flying to photography to life in a tiny desert town to travel to politics to…well, you get the idea.

Finding Content with Categories and Tags

I’ve made content easier to find by embracing WordPress’s category and tag features. Categories are broad topics, tags are narrower ones. For example, you’ll find Flying as a category, but you’ll find helicopters, airplanes, airports, aviation, helicopter video, etc. as tags. The idea is that if you’re interested in flying but don’t give a hoot about helicopters, you can click the airplanes tag and zip right in to content that discusses airplanes. (Don’t expect much; I’m a helicopter pilot.) You can find all categories listed in the sidebar’s category list and all categories assigned to a post in the post’s footer. You can find the most popular 75 tags in the sidebar’s tag cloud and all tags assigned to a post in the post’s footer. All posts have at least one category; all recent posts have at least one tag.

(You can also use the Search box in the header to find content on the site, but even I don’t have very good luck with that. Too many results. This blog has nearly 2,000 posts and unless you’re looking for a topic with a very unusual word — for example, “cauliflower” — you’ll likely come up with more results than you’ll want to wade through.)

Which brings me to the real topic of this post — getting the content you want delivered right to you.

Using RSS to Subscribe to Categories or Tags

A friend of mine who is always sharing aviation photos and videos by e-mail recently discovered my “nosecam” helicopter videos. I create these by fixing a POV.1 video camera to the nose of my helicopter when I go flying. The resulting video can be tediously boring or extremely interesting or somewhere in between. I take the best videos, process them a bit, and put them on Viddler, a video sharing site. (And no, I really can’t explain why I don’t use YouTube. I should probably rethink this a bit if I want the videos to be seen by more people.) Once online, I usually create a blog post with the video embedded. Those are categorized Flying and tagged helicopter video.

Now WordPress has the incredible ability to generate an RSS feed based on any category or tag. The formula for creating the feed URL is very simple:

• For a category on this site, http://www.marialanger.com/category/category-name/feed/rss where category-name is the abbreviated name of the category. You can get the exact category name by looking in the address bar after clicking the category’s link in the sidebar. So the RSS feed for the Flying category would be: http://www.marialanger.com/category/flying/feed/rss
• For a tag on this site, http://www.marialanger.com/tag/tag-name/feed/rss where tag-name is the abbreviated name of the tag. You can get the exact tag name by looking in the address bar after clicking the tag’s link in the sidebar. So the RSS feed for the helicopter video category would be: http://www.marialanger.com/tag/helicopter-video/feed/rss

Of course, knowing in RSS feed URL is one thing, but using it is another. You’ll want to put this URL in your feed reader. If you don’t have one — or don’t even have a clue what I’m talking about — check out Google Reader. It’s a pretty popular feed reader that starts you off with a complete explanation, with video, about RSS feeds and how it works. Perhaps some of the more knowledgeable folks reading this post will share their favorite readers; I’m not big on feed readers and do all my feed reading from within Apple Mail.

Getting Helicopter Videos by E-Mail

Now back to my aviation video friend.

After looking at a bunch of my videos on Viddler, he e-mailed me and asked me to include him on my mailing list to be notified when new helicopter videos come out. Well, I don’t have a mailing list. I’m not one of those people who sees something cool on the Internet and e-mails it to half the people in my address book. In general, I don’t like to receive e-mails like that, so I certainly don’t like to send them.

But I realized that there were probably a few people who were interested in the videos, had no patience for RSS, and couldn’t be bothered manually checking this site periodically. So I whipped up a Feedburner subscription feed specifically for the helicopter video tag. Folks who want notification of the latest helicopter videos published on this site delivered directly to their e-mail in boxes can subscribe using one of the following methods:

• Enter your email address:

  Fill in the form in the box to the right.

• Click this link: Subscribe to “An Eclectic Mind | Helicopter Videos” by Email

Either way, you’ll be sending your e-mail address to Feedburner. Feedburner will send you a confirmation e-mail to assure that you really want to subscribe and this isn’t an attempt by someone else to add you to the list. You will get that e-mail message almost immediately. You MUST follow the instructions in the confirmation e-mail message to complete the subscription process. If you don’t, the subscription will not start. If you can’t find that e-mail message in your in-box, check your spam filter.

Once the subscription is activated, you’ll get an e-mail message only when there’s a new helicopter video on the site. That could be once a month or it could be three times in a week. I tend to release them in batches.

I use the Feedburner service because it’s good. It does not generate any spam. Your e-mail address is not shared with others. I know this because I also subscribe to several of my own feeds, just to make sure spam isn’t going out with the feed content. It’s also really easy to unsubscribe from; just click the link in the bottom of the e-mail message you get.

Getting All Content by E-Mail

You may have noticed an E-Mail Feed link at the top of the sidebar on this site. That’s for all site content. If you subscribe to site content using that link, you’ll get everything, including the helicopter videos. If you’re only interested in the helicopter videos, unsubscribe from that feed and subscribe to this one instead.

I hope this long story (as usual) gives you the information you need to subscribe to the content that interests you most here.

The other day, I read an excellent post by journalist Dan Tynan titled “My Job and welcome to it.” If you are a journalist, blogger, or other type of writer — or have dreams of becoming any of these things — I highly recommend that you read this. It might open up your eyes about how a professional writer works and how the decline in print journalism is affecting them. Many thanks to @estherschindler on Twitter for including this link among the dozens she tweets each day.

In it, he laments about the way his work is echoed on the Web:

And, of course, the blogosphere may pick it up. Kind-hearted conscientious bloggers will write a one paragraph summary and link to the story, citing the source where they found it (though not necessarily the original source). Some will add their own commentary or expertise, though this is pretty rare. Others will lift the story wholesale, but retain my byline and some notion of where they originally found the story. And some evil bloggers will lift the content and claim it as their own, the bastards.

From all of this I get exactly bupkis. Oh, there’s added exposure I suppose. I do always put a link to my own blog (Tynan on Tech) in the bio, and sometimes I see a small traffic spike. But really, the benefit to me personally is next to nil.

I added the emphasis in the first paragraph. It’s the point of this post: that too many bloggers and online content creators are linking back to their sources — but not necessarily the original source.

I see this on Twitter all the time. The Huffington Post, which apparently regurgitates top news and opinion items with a blurb and a quote — sometimes quite lengthy, going beyond what’s considered “fair use” — is frequently linked to from Twitter, Digg, and other sites. The only organization that benefits from this is the one that echoes the content — in this case, The Huffington Post — not the author of the original work or the organization that paid for the work to be written. The result of this is a potential loss of credit and advertising revenue for the true source. People read the meat of the content on the aggregating site, and don’t bother to dig deeper at the source. This not only contributes to the problems we’re having in the world of journalism, but it feeds the “think for me” attitude of so many people who are trying to consume the information that’s out there. After all, why should I read an entire article and form my own opinion when an organization like The Huffington Post can deliver the highlights and opinion for me?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not bashing The Huffington Post. It does serve a purpose. What I am criticizing, however, is the inability of people to recognize the source of someone’s hard work and to share a link to that source rather than to the regurgitated version on another site.

Oddly enough, another link shared on Twitter soon after the link referenced (and properly linked to) above rammed this point home — at least in my mind. It was a link to an article by Mack Collier titled “Five reasons you have a crappy blog.” I read the article, which I found interesting, and was surprised to find a statement buried at the bottom of it that said:

Mack Collier blogs at The Viral Garden. His original post ran here.

I clicked the link on the word “here” and wound up at Mack’s blog, where the exact same post appeared, but with the title “Five reasons why your company blog sucks.” (I guess the word “sucks” was too outrageous for the other site.)

This worried me. Had the other site, the one my Twitter friend linked to, stolen the content from Mack? I went so far as to fire off an e-mail message to him, apologizing for my snoopiness and asking whether he’d given the other site permission. He wrote back promptly, assuring me that he had.

Whew.

Content theft is a major concern of all writers and bloggers. I’ve seen other sites steal content from newspapers and other bloggers and I’m always aware of when it may be happening again.

My point is this: if you’re going to share a link to content with someone, share a link to the original source. (Yes, “original source” is redundant, but I think redundancy is required here.) The same article — or a good portion of its content — might appear multiple times on the Web. The original author deserves to have his work written where it appeared first. This helps him gauge the popularity of a post or topic. It helps concentrate all comments related to the post in one place. If he’s been paid by the source site to write the content, it helps earn him points with the publisher that’ll get him more work in the future or increase his level of compensation. It could also help with advertising revenues if you click an ad on the site.

And you can bet that when I tweeted the link, I used Mack’s site as the source.

To post a comment on any of my blog-based sites, you need to jump three hurdles:

1. You need to get past Bad Behavior, a spam prevention solution that can identify bots. If Bad Behavior thinks the a page is being accessed by a spam bot, it simply does not allow that bot to comment. Does this work? Well, during the past 7 days, Bad Behavior has blocked 2,018 access attempts. Does that mean it has stopped all the bots? Sadly, it doesn’t. But it seems to do a pretty good job.
2. You need to get past Akismet, the WordPress-provided spam filtering tool. Akismet takes the incoming comments that get past Bad Behavior and evaluate them to determine whether they might be spam. If it thinks a comment is spam, it gets put in a spam “bucket” (my term). Does this work? Well, in March it caught 3,830 spam comments, missed only 11 that I flagged as spam, and incorrectly marked only 3 good comments as spam that I rescued. It has caught a total of 54,048 spam comments since October 2008 — that’s just six months.
3. You need to get past me. I read all the comments that Akismet approves and either approve them for posting on the site or mark them as spam that Akismet missed. In certain rare instances, I’ll delete a comment that might not be spam but is, in my opinion, inappropriate for the site. (You can read my comment policy, if you’re interested.) I also briefly review what Akismet has flagged as spam and occasionally rescue a non-spam comment from the spam bucket so it appears on the site.

If you’re not a blogger, you probably don’t realize how big a problem comment spam is. Simply said, if I didn’t have Bad Behavior to block the bots and Akismet to filter out spam comments, this blog would attract anywhere from 10 to 1000 spam comments in a day. Spam comment contents range from links to sites selling drugs or offering online gambling to simple attempts to get some “Google Juice” from links to specific sites. Some of it contains crude and offensive words and ideas. If I let it get by me and allowed it to be posted on my sites, it would likely offend most of my readers.

But lately, I’ve begun getting a new kind of spam: beggar spam. The content of the message goes something like this:

I do not believe I get only one chance in life. I am from Guinea so my English is bad. Please give.

WTF?

Of course, this kind of comment never makes it to my blog. It’s stopped dead by Akismet or me. After a while, Akismet will pick up the pattern that identifies it as spam and properly filter each beggar spam message into the spam bucket.

But the real question is this: do these spammers really expect blog readers — or bloggers, for that matter — to send money to some faceless beggar just because they asked for it? Does anyone actually send them money to give them the idea this ploy works?

Which brings up another thought: The Internet has made it so easy for people to try to suck money out of people that they’ll try anything, no matter how unlikely it is to work. Just get yourself an automated commenting bot, set its options to include the message and link you want, and let it go. Sixty seconds of effort and an Internet connection can flood the world’s blog (and spam filters) with millions of scam attempts. If even one of them is successful, the spammer is ahead of the game.

I wonder how much of the world’s Internet bandwidth is used by but spammers and con artists. I’m not just talking about comment spam here. I’m talking about e-mail from Nigerian princes and widows. I’m talking about responses to For Sale items on online services, where the buyer offers a certified check for more than the purchase amount and asks you to give the difference to his shipping agent. Or the people who e-mail legitimate companies, offering to pay more for services than advertised, with the difference going to a “logistics” agent.

I see how many of these things cross my path in a day or week or month. I’m just one relatively well-connected person. What of the people who are better connected than me? Or the ones that foolishly put their e-mail addresses, unencoded, on a Web site so the spam bots can scrape them up for sale to spammers? Or the ones with blogs at the top of Google’s page rank that get thousands of visitors a day?

How much of the Internet is wasted on fraud and spammy self-promotion?

Anyway, I’d love to get feedback from other bloggers or people experienced with spam. What’s the most ridiculous spam you’ve ever received? The one that made you think the spammer thinks everyone is a gullible fool? Use the Comments link or form for this post.

And don’t try to spam me, please. Your comment will never appear on this site.