My article “Interpreting Intentionally Vague Language” was featured in the RID Views, Spring 2011. If you read the article, or are already familiar with VL, I would like to know your thoughts on the subject, so please feel free to leave a comment on this blog post.
In case you’re interested, I teach workshops on VL and other topics— and love to travel. 🙂
Why don’t blog spam filters recognize as spam those generic comments that link to commercial websites? Akismet used to filter all the spam that came into my blog, but now there’s a type it never catches– generic comments linked to a money-making (or even phishing or malicious) websites. These spammers write adulatory comments that don’t address the content or topic of the post. They tell you that you have just earned a new follower and that they will add you to their RSS feed straightaway. They say things like, “This is the best post I’ve ever read on the subject.” Note they say “the subject” without naming it. Sometimes they even write editorial comments that have nothing to do with your blog post. Here is an actual examples taken from a recent comment on my blog:
Here’s one posted on my blog entry “Comparison of EPUB Download Sites”
How risky is blogging really? Blog firings are relatively rare. In a recent survey of 279 human resource professionals by the Society for Human Resources Management, just 3 percent of companies reported disciplining bloggers and none reported firing anyone for blogging. You’re more likely to get in trouble for fooling around online or downloading music at work. About half the companies in the survey said they’ve fired or disciplined employees for Internet use that was unrelated to work duties.
Note I didn’t say anything about “blog firings” or the risk of blogging in my post.
If there’s any risk of blogging, it’s for your blog to be highjacked by people using your publication to promote their get-rich-quick schemes.
Here’s one on my blog post “My first Speak & Spell workshop“:
This is an excellent post. I have a similar blog myself so I will keep coming back to read more.
And this from a guy who runs a blog about magic spells. At least his comment addressed the topic of my blog post, even if incorrectly.
I’ll add more examples as they come in, which I’m sure they will.
P.S. This is not a paid advertisement, but I do like using WordPress for Android because new comments to my blog show up as notifications on my Nexus One and I can follow the notification to open the app and mark comments as spam if I choose. It helps me stop spammers sooner than if I had to wait to get to a computer and log into my blog’s admin dashboard.
A recurring theme in my life has been that I feel like a loser. Then again, sometimes I feel like a winner. In order to get a grasp on this, and come clean about feeling like a loser, I am determined to sit down and write it out.
In some of my early childhood memories, I remember being cursed with a sort of social awkwardness that made me feel like a loser, or perhaps more correctly, I did things that people responded to by saying things that I interpreted as, “what a loser!”
There was the first day of kindergarten, when I thought one of our teachers had identified herself as Mrs. Coffee. I don’t know remember what I wanted to ask her, but I remember raising my hand and saying, “Mrs. Coffee!” over and over again and getting no response, until finally a girl sitting near me glared at me with her precocious little five-year-old venom and said, “There is no ‘Mrs. Coffee.’” I felt like an idiot not only for mishearing the teacher’s name, but for sticking my neck out by raising my hand and calling it repeatedly.
There was that time… (more…)
Just as a boat is chained to the sea, sometimes I feel chained to Flickr.
I am now going through the 420 photos I took during the six days of my trip. Four hundred and twenty photos that all came out well. Yes, there are some things that I took multiple shots of in order to get the best one, but still… how do you work your way through all that and post it on Flickr without boring people? I’ve been limiting myself to posting only three or four photos a day so that people will look at them, which seems to be working, except I have to ask myself why I share all these photos with the world. I took this working vacation on my own, and one of the reasons I took these photos was to share them with my husband, Andy, who couldn’t come on the trip with me. That makes sense to me– to want to share with my husband everything I wish I could have shared with him while we were apart. And I suppose it makes sense to want to share photos with family and close friends. But I’m starting to wonder why I care whether people I’ve never met will stop and look at my photos. I hardly make any money giving my photos away. I could write travel articles and get paid for the work I put into taking, geotagging, editing, organizing, naming, describing my photos… but I don’t. Instead, I spend several hours each day on the computer and on Flickr. I post photos and look at other people’s photos. I enjoy this, but often it seems like work.
I sometimes look at what I do as a creative outlet and a chance to share information with others just for the sake of sharing. I guess there’s a part of me that (more…)
Raymond Luczak published a story of mine in his book Eyes Of Desire 2: A Deaf GLBT Reader, available at Amazon.com.. My story is called “My First Deaf Guy” and it’s about my first lover, who happened to be Deaf, and why we broke up. (It might not be why you think.) I created this blog post so people who read the book and look me up through my bio in the book have a space to leave comments on the story.
Daniel Greene 