I noticed a recent uptick in e-mail spam that looks like Linked-In invitations. When I received the first such message I actually opened it and looked to see if I recognized the person soliciting the connection. When that message was followed by the flood of variations characteristic of other spam campaigns, I stopped reading them. While I am sure that my spam filter will eventually learn to remove such messages, there is, in fact, a better way to handle such situations. In fact, there’s app for that.

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We have a little spam problem on the blog. Not the kind that you can filter out, however. (We had that too, but we filtered it.) Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve gotten a lot of traffic pointing to a spam comment (which we had removed) on a post from last year. Whereas the post received  fewer than 30 views in the previous year, it was now getting several hundred hits a day. What happened?

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Preservation is a branch of library science dedicated to the maintenance of physical artifacts. Digital preservation, its modern offspring, concerns itself with the preservation of digital artifacts such as documents, movies, audio recordings, etc. But the challenges of digital preservation are complicated by interactivity characteristic of many digital artifacts. It’s not enough to save the bits, if the goal is to understand the experience of using something in its original form. I have in mind such things as interactive fiction, video and computer games, and other similar artifacts.

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I get a fair bit of spam. Every day I delete about 400 messages that my spam filter catches; this blog has amassed over 7,000 spam comments in six months or so; and now, Twitter is getting spammy too. I’ve noticed a rash of twitter-spam-bot followers recently, and am quite confused as to what they are trying to achieve.

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