Notes from Anywhere by Nelson Nones

Spam, Splog and Swiki

Wikipedia's definition of Wiki vandalism includes "Spam, the insertion of irrelevant links for commercial purposes only."

Since there is now such a thing as splog, I'd like to propose the Neologism Swiki, meaning a form of Wiki vandalism in which the vandal inserts irrelevant links for commercial purposes only.

A good example of this is Wikipedia's supply chain article. This page was updated with spam links to a well-known software vendor at least twice in September.

And I thought they were a class company! Lord knows, I'd never do that!

Blogging On The Mainland

I can write this without interference, now that I'm back in Thailand.

After I arrived in Shenzhen on October 17th, I logged into my typepad account and got a message saying that my user ID was incorrect (bollix). On the second try I got a message warning me that the site's certificate wasn't on file in my computer (the certificate came from a site that doesn't have anything do do with typepad or Six Apart).

What this means is: big brother is watching in the Mainland whenever you're composing a new post or editing an existing post there.

I suspect this is why Google is sometimes unavailable there (amazingly, however, Google Earth runs like a top); and when it is, you can never see cached pages or view documents (like .pdf documents) in html.