Spam in blog comments has become a problem in the blogosphere lately. Bloggers have been busy manually deleting entries, blocking IP addresses and some people have come up with comment spam filters that use keywords and such in a similar way as spam filters do.
Now here’s a thought: Comments are sent using forms on web pages and these pages are controlled by the blog owners – right? This means it is radically different from email spam, where the sender’s only connection to the recipient is knowing (or guessing) his or her email address.
I believe a solution to the problem would be to require the sender to do something “uniquely human”, similar to the image identification methods used by many free email services to fight of robot registrations.
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Earlier this week I stumbled upon a highly interesting research by 
This entry is adapted from a presentation I did at the 
Technologically minded people tend to look for technological solutions to the problems they face. Naturally so, but every technological solution can be improved. There is always another solution, simpler and better than the current one. Most inventors will admit that they know a lot of ways to improve on their solutions – an optimization here a redesign there, etc. The solutions in use are comprimises between the optimal and the practical. Necessarily so, to keep down cost.
Machine translations have been somewhat of a holy grail in AI and language technologies for decades. And for a good reason. In a world of ever increasing international business and cooperation, effective communication is crucial. Fast and reliable, automated translations would therefore be of tremendous value, but despite serious efforts it is still far from realization.
Through the years, I’ve seen more “value chains” than I care to remember. “Where do you see yourselves in the value chain?”, is a VC question ranking up there with “Are you burning enough?” and “Would you people consider yourselves to be a … [fill in the blank: infrastructure, content-only, aggregator, consolidator, etc.] company?” in a series that look even more amusing in hindsight than they did at the time (BTW. the correct answer to the last question is “Yes” regardless of everything. You’ll just have to find a way to rationalize it later on in the conversation.)
When I say I’m interested biology because I believe that looking to nature for fresh ideas in software and other technology design, most people look at me like I’m crazy – or even tell me bluntly that I am. But I’m not easily offended nor easily convinced that it’s me and not them that are crazy.
Do you remember the “
hjalli.com - Hjálmar GÃslason 