It’s been too long a break, but I am now slowly getting back into the blogging groove.

Of course, it’s an exciting time to be back. With Leopard, you never quite know — alarms in iCal, admin privileges, .Mac syncing — everything’s an adventure!

Thanks to all those who commented that it’s nice to have Hawk Wings back.

Thanks too to Akismet which caught 53,000 comment spams while I was away. Nonetheless, over 630 comments spams slipped through into the comment moderation queue. I deleted them all, and I am sorry if your unapproved comment died with them.

Onwards and upwards. personal, not apple mail, not mail.app, comment spam, akismet, wordpress

A Murder of Crows has a interview with a London-based comment spammer who describes how he pastes his comment spam all over the net.

Link spamming, if you don’t know, is the attempt to increase the search engine ranking of PPC (Pills, Porn and Casino) sites by posting URLs as comments on blogs. Search engines then index them and the PPC sites rise in the rankings.

Interestingly, the spammer doesn’t aim to raise his product to the number one spot. “Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates,” he says. “I don’t know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page.”

He also explains why he does it (money) and how it he is not as evil as email spammers:

Sam distances himself, very definitely, from email spammers – particularly those who use tailored viruses to turn broadband-linked PCs into spam generators. “I’m using badly-configured proxy servers. I believe that’s different from those which are hacked. But I speak to the top seven or eight link spammers, and they don’t use bot PCs. People who do blog spamming won’t be doing email spamming.” Using proxy servers, Sam argues, is legal.

spam, link spammer, comment spam, email