Spam Karma 2 is the name of the beast, and it works fabulously of course, but more than that it is like a Dyson Vacuum cleaner in that you can peer into it from the WordPress dashboard and all of the cleverly assembled inner workings are right there on show. Even better, all of the settings and fine tunings are easily user configurable, and in a pleasant rather than onerous fashion. So many thanks to Dr Dave, unknown genius indeed, who would appear to be some kind of DJ in his day job when not “wasting his time coding ridiculously elaborate anti-spam plugins”. This is no waste of time, it makes an art form out of fuzzy logic and modular design.

I have been recommended Akismet before, but when I looked into how it works I discovered that all comments have to be diverted to a web service somewhere for processing and I don’t think that’s such a great idea. The danger I perceived is when the web server is down, or broken, or upgraded without notice or turned into a paid-for system then your blog’s comments system is suddenly rendered non functioning for some period of time during which you may not notice. Spam Karma on the other hand is more devolved in that it does all of its clever modular ranking and decision-making all by itself, in situ on the blog installation, and then possibly sends a report back to base if it feels like it. You don’t have to do anything other than to install it and leave it on default settings to get on with its business if you like, but I’ve been checking the closest to borderline cases for a few weeks as well. So far there have been no false positives and only 2 spams passed through out of thousands. Brilliant.

The implications for the DARnet blog are that I no longer need to compromise by disabling comments on some older posts which are heavily targeted, so the possibility of older discussions coming back to life is increased, and indeed a couple of not so old posts have come back to life recently, as I shall show in my next post thanking various commenters.

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“How are we going to hold the more fragile communities together when some of the key contributors may be increasingly tempted to publish their ideas mainly on their own blogs to the detriment of the overall level of interaction?”

Since then, there has been a discussion on ACTKM mailing list mostly entitled “Blogs vs Forums” which has thrown up some possible answers, for example the suggestion that forum discussions go deeper and last longer, whereas blog conversations (where they happen at all), tend to fizzle out quite quickly.

You have to be careful though, not to imagine that it’s in the comments attached to blog posts that conversations will normally take place. The comments area may look like forums, but they are not, and the real conversation taking place in the blogosphere tends to happen between blogs, typically with one blogger writing a post which picks up and develops an idea referencing what another blogger posted earlier on their own blog, and so on.

In such a way, possible blogging ‘’communities’’ bound together by hyperlinks, RSS, trackbacks, pings tags and searches may arise deliberately or spontaneously in a more or less decentralised fashion.

Jack Vinson certainly entertains the idea of blogging and communities

But are these bloggers, standing as they do somewhat aloof from the forums which they may also take part in, helping to draw in wider participation from the general web, through their high ranking in the search engines and engagement with wider communities, or are they drawing energy and ideas away from forums, diluting the special power of many-to-many asynchronous dialogue?

It is perhaps at the boundaries where the two worlds (blogs and forums) meet that interesting things are happening and future trends may perhaps be spotted.

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