Now I had to find out what on earth was using up so much space. As it turns out my default email account which I never use was the victim of email spoofing. There were over 70,000 daemon failure messages amongst other spammy emails.

I promptly notified tech support and within minutes they had something setup to prevent any of those mails from getting into my account. I finally managed to delete all of those emails and was able to update to the latest release of WordPress this morning.

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I also had  a separate section for photos and poetry, I decided to get rid of both but will probably integrate my poetry into this blog.  I’m going to change my homepage as it was old and tired and needed something fresh.  A good friend of mine helped me out with that.   I’ll probably spend some time on it tonight.

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I can’t answer whether or not Internet users are clicking on fewer Google ads or not but I can share my perspective on the matter. This blog is by no means popular, nor do I get thousands of visitors everyday. Regardless, there are Google ads displayed on every page and in the past two months with over 4000 ad impressions (viewings) there has only been 1 ad clicked on. For the record it wasn’t me, lol! You don’t need to do the math to realize that the click through rate is next to non-existent. I think that speaks for itself as there’s no money being made here, not from Google ads anyhow. :-) That means, no money for me, Google or the advertiser.

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In visiting a great blog and reading the wonderfully written post I am inspired to go and comment only to find out one of a few things. Anonymous comments are disabled or not allowed, you have to register to comment and/or no link luv is being given. When I see something like that I usually feel snubbed and don’t bother. Not only do I not bother leaving a comment, I never bother visiting that blog again. For one, there are too many blogs out there to bother registering with each one just so I can comment. Two, even if I did what’s the point? I become a random comment at the end of the post with no link back to who I am. I’ve been around on the web long enough that someone could do a web search for Jono Cono and easily find my blog but is that the way it’s supposed to work? Not really!

Some blogs may be set up this way to get away from comment spam and/or having to deal with comment moderation. These are valid issues and can be a pain to deal with. There are other methods of dealing with those issues while still allowing anonymous (name/url) comments with links. For instance you could use security (captcha) images for verification and the like. I used to get thousands of spam comments until I added simple security images for verification and now along with Askimet 0 spam gets through everyday. This way any human being can easily comment and become part of the conversation leaving a link back to their own blog or site. If for whatever reason you want people to register then their profile name could at least link back to their site/blog if they have one.

Great conversations should flow back and forth with people being able to take an active part in them. It’s more than just writing words in response but leaving links back to who we are. That becomes our online substance in being part of the blogging community.

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Anyone know what happened to contentdj.com the directory?

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Yesterday I read an article from Business week that coincided nicely with the results of some later blog surfing.  The article made many good points, one of them being that while there may be over 9 million blogs out there the majority of them are junk:

Self-obsession, politics of hate, and the same hunger for fame that has people lining up to trade punches on The Jerry Springer Show. Name just about anything that’s sick in our society today, and it’s on parade in the blogs. On lots of them, even the writing stinks.

That point is very true, anyone who’s done their fair share of surfing random blogs has surely come across blogs that would fit into the above.  Some may find some of these blogs shocking and others may just find them sadly wanton or otherwise predictably lacking.

Later in the day yesterday I was surfing through Blog Explosion when I again realized how many blogs out there fit into a different category.  Blog Explosion is a blog directory so what I am about to describe is a two part problem.  Surfing randomly through Blog Explosion although starting with Canadian blogs I quickly recognized a pattern.  Most of these blogs either hadn’t been updated in years and were just static remnants of what they were or could have been or they weren’t a blog at all.

I’m sure most everyone has run across websites that have domains one letter off from a real website, these sites are just sitting there for the purpose of making money off sponsored links and Adsense.   They’re complete crap and a waste of time.  A lot of blog listings in Blog Explosion will have the name of the blog, a (blog like) description etc.  You click on the link and voila, no blog or it’s a completely different website full of sponsored links or trying to sell something.

Blog Explosion as a blog directory should have some method of purging old blogs, dead blogs and non blogs.  Even if it’s as simple as allowing users to flag these blogs as they’re going through.  I probably surfed through 100 blogs last night, roughly 15 of them had been updated in the past week or were an actual blog.  Blog Explosion does have requirements for blogs submissions, but once the blog or site is in the directory there doesn’t seem to be any rules regarding maintenance and keeping the directory active and up to date.  It’s something they may want to work on!

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Summer normally finds me more often outside then in front of my computer.  You can only sit in front of your computer for so long before you start wondering if you’re missing out on life a little bit.  I have lot’s that I can write about and soon I shall do just that, sit down and start writing!

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I sincerely have to question the logic behind this so called ‘movement’ based on a few things that I read which are quite contradictory. For one thing in the WTF I read support is requested by blogging against Theocracy this Easter weekend. The following sentence in the WTF goes on to define how this separation benefits us all and lists freedom from religious discrimination. Well whoever wrote the WTF clearly didn’t think things through! By attempting to make a point through ‘Blogging against Theocracy’ during a religious Christian feast, well I’d say that’s tantamount to discrimination in itself. Wow, I didn’t really need to write much to debunk ‘Blogging against Theocracy’ but what the heck, I’ll keep going!

To so called blog against Theocracy is indeed to blog against the Government of the United States. The last time I checked, God wasn’t regularly being recognized as the supreme civil ruler in the United States so Theocracy doesn’t even apply. While Bush may regard himself as a deity he doesn’t quite make the cut. So what else are we left with? If Democracy doesn’t seem to be working out well in the United States that’s the fault of the people who live there. Why not blog against democracy instead or even against the people of the United States?

Given that the United States doesn’t even have a Theocracy the rest of the statements in the WTF I read are inane. The whole drive behind this so called ‘Blog against Theocracy’ seems to be driven out of the want for some sort of fantasy freedom with no consequences or criticism to follow. Guess what you’re all already free, you have free will and yes there are consequences and there will always be criticism for everything whether it be positive or negative. We don’t need to redefine humanity as an excuse to justify certain things.

Should I start a blogswarm aptly titled “Bloggers against ‘Blog against Theocracy’ for poor word choice and generalization of word definition while contradicting themselves in what could be loosely defined as a mission statement”? Sounds like fun but not really a constructive use of my time!

Have a Happy Easter everyone!

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I think this is going to work pretty well and because it’s Flash I won’t have to worry about people hot linking my photos either.  I’ll let you know when it’s all done!

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