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.