I came across this site this morning:

Search Subjects on AllofIceland.com – The Best Icelander Directory.

The page is obviously designed to fool search engine robots to index links to “advertisers'” web sites. It’s quite easy to see that the page is automatically generated, but still some serious effort has been put into making look – at least to an index robot – as it is made by a human.

Wonder how well this works and what methods Googlebot uses to avoid junk like this.

Anyway, I found item 40 a bit funny: “Articles on Icelander car rentals found inside Surtsey.”

For those of you that don’t know, Surtsey is a small volcanic island that was formed in an eruption in 1963-1967 and is today an isolated geological research area that only two dozen people or so have ever set foot on.

I wonder if they rented a car 😉

(Thanks to Magga for the link)

I have only received one spam email today. By this time of the day I’ve on average over the last months received about 10-15 spam emails on my 3 web-exposed email addresses, sometimes more. I checked with some of my friends, and many of them have the same story.

I’ve jokingly commented before that I like spam, because it tells me that my email server is alive and kicking. Well today’s absence of spam had me run a few email checks to see if it was ok, and all the vitals indicate good health. Plus I’ve received quite a few real emails both newsletters and personal.

After all the criticism of the new Can Spam Act, I doubt that is the cause. But what else could it be? Are I and my friends just going through a weird statistical spam-void or is it something others have noticed as well.

P.S. Wise guys that take this as an invitation to spam me – don’t bother, I never read them anyway!

Happy new year everybody! To celebrate the new year I made some minor changes to the Wetware site. Most notable is the Trendwatch section.

Instead of posting the news links I find once a week, I will be sending them directly to the Trendwatch as I come across them. There should be a couple of new links there several times during the week. Trendwatch also has its own RSS feed so you can subscribe to it separately from the more lengthy articles that will still keep coming at a similar rate as before.

Thanks for reading Wetware last year and please keep sending me tips about interesting stuff that could make good articles or Trendwatch links.

A couple of years ago I visited the Science Museum in London. Of all the wonderful sights there, one item keeps coming to mind: Bill Phillips’ Financephalograph; a “computer” that simulated a nation’s economics using flowing water.

The Financephalograph was built in 1949 by Bill Phillips, an engineer and then student of sociology at London School of Economics (he would later become world famous as an economist for his Phillips Curve).
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I went to see a presentation by Sir David Attenborough yesterday. He’s in Iceland for a couple of days as a translation of his latest book The Life of Mammals is being published, following the success of the TV documentary series with the same title.

There’s only one word for Sir David – brilliant! His joyful enthusiasm about his work carries on to everybody around him. It was an unusual sight to see an overcrowded lecture hall ahhh-ing, laughing and crying for the events in the lives of creatures ranging from simple plants to the planet’s most dangerous carnivores. Nice to see that the public can still be interested in something else than the latest Hollywood blockbusters.
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