LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

I have good news for visitors of the.effing.librarian: I've recently contracted with Blog Angels.

Blog Angels provides blog guard services for major corporations around the world. Many web sites are continually and constantly monitored by corporate staff, but small blogs like mine are often left unoccupied for hours at a time (Blake assures me that this is not the case with LISNews as he hires day-laborers of questionable legal status to monitor and guard this site). But I can't be everywhere at once; I need to eat and work and poop. Okay, yes I do all those things at my desk, but you know what I mean.

So who is there to guard your blog when you are away? Who's going to keep out the riff-raff? Have you ever seen a blog that's been overtaken by hoodlums and thugs? I've seen plenty of blogs, innocent oases for vacation photos, kitties wearing feather boas, breastfeeding tips, and diet diaries suddenly get tagged with graffitos, their banners pulled down, posts disassembled, and feeds choked without that watchful eye or sturdy boot around to keep order.

The Washington Post: With a test, Web sites let people in and keep out computers set to unleash spam attacks. Now, computers are cracking the code.

Cool, caring young New York artist, the me nobody knows...and his flickr page.

The planning wiki for Uncontrolled Vocabulary showed a piece from ACRLog impacting NexGens.

Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team and an engineer who's been working on the problem for eight years, offered some tips about combating it during a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo here.
• Use captcha systems to make sure real people, not bots, are commenting on your site.
• Reconfigure software settings after you've installed it
• Employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation.
• Don't be afraid of legitimate purveyors of search-engine optimization services.

Shirley Dent wonders Is her commenting culture so civilised because books breed wit and intelligence, or because what we discuss is not so grave?

Are you tired of reading banal BS on Twitter?

Or maybe, just maybe, does it scare you that so many people Twitter the most personal things?

Well it scares Tycho too. And today's Penny Arcade tackles the topic of Twittering when it goes a little too far.

Warning: Language is not for the easily offended. Regardless, it's still hilarious.

A while back, on this very site, a sort of debate flourished about Twitter. Does it matter? Is it useful? I like it. I don't. It's crap. It's great.

And so the discussion continues.

However, a journalism student from UC Berkeley found Twitter to be of real use when he was swept up by Egyptian police while filming a protest. By tapping out one single word on his phone (ARRESTED) he alerted a network of friends and family to his situation.

Mercury News has the story.

Brazilian ISPs are preparing to block access to all wordpress.com sites after a judge ordered a block on a particular blog hosted there.

The ISPs claim they cannot block one particular blog from that domain, but rather must block the whole wordpress.com TLD. I'm no expert on ISPs nor Brazilian law, but this seems like the ISPs want to kill a fly with a shotgun.

If you are interested, and can read Portugese, the article from G1 is interesting.

Helpful hints from ProBlogger.