From December 25th through December 29th I received 56 spam comments on this blog.  The great majority of these were for online casinos.

WordPress has a feature that enables the blogger to moderate comments before they are posted, then once a commenter has been approved, any further comments will automatically be approved.  It’s a system that seems to work very well.  There is also an anti-spam plugin that I could use that would automatically handle most of the spam, but being such a small blog, I didn’t see the need and figured I would cross that bridge if I ever came to it.

So my question is, are there bloggers that actually do not moderate their comments, such that “comment spam” is really a worthwhile form of mass marketing?  A follow-up question is if anyone came across a comment that advertised a casino, would you click on the link?  That second question is as perplexing to me as its equivalent in the realm of email spam.  Why would anyone click on an unsolicited link in their email?  I don’t care if you do need a bigger penis, talk to a doctor not some anonymous spammer.

Merry Christmas and I wish everyone a blessed New Year.

Since I started keeping my own blog I have been doing a lot of blog reading as well.  One particular brand of blog has me mystified.

I’m sure you have all seen these blogs.  The aren’t exactly rare.  The author simply quotes the first sentence or two of an article and then links to the original article.  No commentary at all, just a link.  No explanation of why he linked there, just the link.  I can understand a one-off post like this occasionally, as if “I don’t have time to type anything right now, but I thought my readers might be interested so here’s a link.”  But most of the blogs I’ve encountered that incorporate this style of blogging are filled with only this type of post.

Are these things helpful?  Do people use them?  I get frustrated when I come across one.  I read a blog to find out the author’s perspective.  If I simply wanted to find an article, I would use Google.  I use Technorati to find “commentary” – hopefully good commentary that sparks conversation.