Ensight - Jeremy Wright

Here is my very short commentary on some of the recent things that have been happening around the blogosphere and the world.

Tsunami: I was tickled pink when the Canadian government decided to match every donation private citizens made to a select number of charities. Canadians stepped up to the plate and raised more than 35M$, which the government has already matched. This is in addition to another 50M$ in other donations raised by Canadians and Canadian companies. I’ll never say “we’ve raised enough” because in a situation like this there’s no such thing as enough. Several charities have switched away from “cash mode” into “hope mode”. “Hope mode” is an essential part of any disaster relief. One charity is collecting 5000 teddy bears to give to kids in the affected areas. It doesn’t make a difference overall, but it makes a huge difference to each kid who receives one. Other charities are doing similarl hope-based programs, in addition to their cash and food and clothing programs.

“Kosgate”: Apparently he !@#$’d up (excuse my french). Apparently there’s more to the story. Apparently this is basically political in nature so I don’t care. However, it is also about blogging, so I do care. What’s my final answer? The nature of blogging is such that you have to disclose your income sources (when talking about similar subjects). You have to be discrete in what you talk about (and know the ramifications if you aren’t). You have to be aware that everything can come back to bite you in the ass (and not be afraid of that). Kos, like me, learned some of this the hard way.

Google Tackles Comment Spam: Good move. However it’s not going to “stop” comment spam. It just changes the economics and metrics. The reality is that one of the apps I’ve seen can spam 1 million wordpress and / or movabletype blogs in 5 minutes. At those economics levels, only one person needs to click, only 10 blogs need to not be using the “nofollow” for it to be worthwhile. This solution is akin to saying “net identity solutions will solve email spam”, which is false. Knowing who people are is step one. Knowing that their intent is malicious is step 2. Being able to do something about it is step 3. Having a central authority is step 4. This little piece of Google’s doesn’t actually solve any of those, and it treats all commenters with equal disdain, which is sad (if understandable).

The Red Couch’s Proposal is out. Well done guys. I’m mentioned, and dismissed as having “the experience on the issues addressed as Scoble and Israel”. That’s fine. When writing a proposal you HAVE to position yourself as the best. I didn’t do any different. Congrats to the guys, hopefully someone picks up this project. Speaking of which, two publishers will be making decisions in the next week about my book. Both publishers I respect immensely and would love to work with.