Manual monitoring of spam has greatly been reduced and I can now do other things like live a normal life. There are however some cases where I wonder if the plugin was asleep as some very obvious comments made it through all the way to my email inbox. Today for example, I received two emails that contained so many adult words that I stopped counting after 100.

I know that the plugin is a “machine” using some artificial intelligence to decide whether a comment is spam or not.  I just find it odd that it works so flawlessly most of the times but it sometimes lets those obvious comments go through the cracks.

All in all, Defensio does the job pretty well and considering the price (free), I’m quite happy. I encourage you to use it!

One last advise to the Defensio coders; if a word is repeated over 50 times or if a comment has more than 10 URLs, it’s probably spam :)

1. Wordpress – Twitter merger

Ah ha! Yes I know there are many widgets for Twitter but what I want has to be chronological and form one whole myoma. It should blend in with the other articles (instead of being lost in a sidebar, along with ads – where no one looks anyways) and be included in the RSS feed as well. Facebook has something pretty close where you can see which groups you joined, set your mood and so on. I don’t really care about moods but perhaps there’s a market for it (teens?).

2. Better MyBlogLog integration (aka turn all blogs in a big social network)

Allow to post using MyBlogLog’s user account and when possible, put a picture of the user who posted next to his comment thus encouraging users to visit each other’s blogs. Perhaps an expandable “last 5 comments” wherever the posts were made would allow users to find out even more blogs although I see some privacy issues here… Perhaps you guys don’t really want to know that I also post comments on a Coconut fetish blog. I also find it very hard to find good blogs so I tend to visit blogs of people who post but this could be automated somehow. MyBlogLog adds blogs you visit often but from memory, and other that “what’s hot”, it doesn’t suggest anything based on your preferences/behaviour..? Last thought: Facebook allows you to have a blog, so why not turn all blogs in a Facebook killer? Maybe OpenID could help solve this although it’s not a planned feature as far as I know…

3. Rateable comments

Not your everyday Slashdot/Digg style comments though. I want the top 5 comments to make it the front page AND the RSS feed. That way, you might get hooked on the great comments and read the whole article and the rest of the comments. I think everything in live should be “rateable” as no one likes to read crap and sometimes comments are more interesting than the actual article. So an article could get a rating/activity boost because of the quality of the comments. I often scan blog articles in my RSS reader and I’m sure I miss out a lot of great views/ideas/etc. Using a Digg icon just doesn’t work (unless you want to be featured on Digg) as the number of comments is not always an indication of the quality.

How about you guys? What would make your life easier?

Google apps are now free but consider this: in the future, would you mind watching a 30 seconds advertisement to use a totally free version online? This is a great way of making a LOT of money for Google. Say that Google restricts you to 1 hour of free online editing after which you must watch another advertisement, that makes a lot of money at the end of the year. I don’t want to do big calculations but if we estimate a revenue of “25 cents per ad” X “usage per year” than that’s big money IF because there is a IF, you consider software piracy.

See, when Microsoft gets his software pirated, they don’t get any money at all. Some might say that MS wants people to pirate their software instead of other software as it creates a big pool of people who know and want MS software at work. The Microsoft rebates for students and teachers is a great way to mould those innocents brains and dictate them in the right path. Let’s face it, what are the alternatives to Excel and Word? While I could quickly give out some alternatives, most people don’t even know about Word Perfect, Star Office or Open Office.

But back to money. If you pirate Microsoft software, they get no revenues. That’s plain simple. If you use free software from Google, they get some money. Once again, using the 25 cents per ad example, someone using a Google app once a week for 1 year will bring in 13$ in Google’s pockets. If you use it everyday then that’s 65$ in Google’s pockets. See where I’m going? It’s not a lot, but better than nothing! Of course, if someone is paying for a full license, then Microsoft is making more money. But I’d be curious to know the percentage of people who pirate software and I’ll bet you the Google boys studied that as well and I’m sure they’ll be coming with a “watch ads as you need” plan soon… Evil? Hmm not really. Genius? getting close.

Also, let’s not forget that Google now includes Star Office in their free Google apps package. Time to sell your Microsoft stocks?

Forward yourself a few years in the future. The future is and will be the browser. TV channels, radios, newspapers and yellow pages are all virtually extinct within the geek crowd. Google is working on everything “online” including user storage. What we need to do now is to work on getting decent bandwidth and online storage will be interesting (I’m not even going to talk about privacy here!)

As a bonus to the readers, here’s a free idea to anyone willing to take on the challenge: Come up with a great way to play games “truly online”. By that, I’m mean games that are playable in a browser (without a console) and playable anywhere and anytime. And while we’re at it, why can’t games be free just like those Google apps? Product placement and micro-localized advertisement could do the trick. There’s money to be made in them kids!

Oh well, maybe when I get old… :)