Week 10 is all but past. Then Finals and grad­ing (all of my grade need to be fin­ished and in by the end of next week). After that, the future is a bit unknown. But there will be more research and blogging.

In the mean­time, I’m get­ting more inter­ested in the pro­duc­tion of Blog Spam bots. Or rather their logic. Or what they are trying to accom­plish beyond traf­fic. Whats inter­est­ing is how they select old posts to "bomb" with mes­sages. For some reason they keep spam­ming the Lessig Photo Post. I can’t figure out if there is some­thing in that post that makes it attractive.

So far my favorite peice of spam is this one:

Polish… polish food, lot polish air­line, car polish, green nail polish, nail polish…

It’s a great peice of lin­gus­tic play, though seman­ti­cally speak­ing, I don’t think it was inten­tional. But there you have the switch from Polish aka Poland to polish as in waxy buildup.

The last ten weeks have flown. Lots to report and no time to post. Per­haps later today. Perhaps.

Mod­i­fiers can be odd little things. Eariler today I got an e-mail from the chair­per­son of the School of Print­ing asking to set up a <i>short</i> meet­ing. As the empha­sis notes, "short" is the oper­a­tive word (or rather mod­i­fier). I have no idea what this is about. I sus­pect it may be job related. Which then sets me into the tizzy of is "short" good or bad. Or is it neu­tral, like eating a sand­wich (points to anyone who gets that ref­er­ence)? Either way, I find out tomorrow.

Beyond that there are a number of inter­ac­tions of note going on, both at RIT and in var­i­ous com­mu­ni­ties on the inter­net. I plan on blog­ging about them. One day. I hope.

This past week has been full of speaker, classes, tests, and excite­ment. All of those things have inter­fered with my abil­ity to blog. That will hope­fully change soon. But not today.

Seems like I can’t get away from bots. My Lessig/Nader post keeps get­ting hit by comment-​bots (pro­grams that leave com­ments with links to com­merce sites). While that’s not par­tic­u­lar­lly new, the last bot com­ment is a little novel:

Matthew Says:
May 1st, 2006 at 3:24 am e

Matthew…
Looks like your page was spammed…

Its another case of a bot com­ment­ing on other bots. From the syntax, I’m guss­ing it’s the same pro­gram that left the last few com­ments. I am curi­ous if this bot script hap­pened to be named "Matthew" or it pulled that off of some meta­data (or good ‘ol fash­ioned pub­lished con­tent) on this site.

I’ve seen this tactic of having a bot com­ment on bots occur with chat­ter­bots. I men­tioned it briefly in my thesis:

[Some chat­ter­bots are scripted to] voice frus­tra­tion at other bots within the cha­t­room, by post­ing things such as “I can’t believe there are so many bots in this room!” One notable script, per­haps in hopes of elim­i­nat­ing the com­pe­ti­tion, informs chat­ters that “If every­one com­plains to yahoo, we’ll get these bots kicked out. ” These adap­ta­tions high­light how authors con­tin­u­ally, and reflex­ively, evolve their scripts based on obser­va­tion of cha­t­room reac­tion to bots and on the results of data col­lected by the bots in one-​to-​one IM sessions.

The lack of post­ing is directly pro­por­tional to my grad­ing load. It’s drag­ging me under right now. Per­haps next year, if all works out, I can get a TA or at least a grader.