It’s been interesting to watch the evolutionary dance of spam and blogs. Comment spam. Trackback spam. Splogs. Now here’s a bit of email spam targetting the would-be pro blogger:
>Hi,
>
>I don’t like to waste valuable time of creative blogmasters.
>But I cann’t resist myself from this tempting offer too.
Hello, you may know me from such spam as “Nigerian dictator’s family” and “v!agra!”
>Here is the one time offer.
>
>6 great Components
>
>1) Blogging to the Bank + Update – $47
>2) Blogging Videos – $97
>3) Monetizing Your Blog Interview – $99.95
>4) The Underground Blogging Reports – $147.77
>5) Blog Announcer Pro – $97
>6) Article Assistance – $67
>
>Total Value $555.72
>
>Available today for $147.
>
>A must have tool for every blogmaster
>
>Here is the link http://redacted
>
>Peter
>
>One Time Offer Marketing Team
>
>PS: 30 Day Zero Risk, No Hard Feelings 100% Money Back Guarantee
>PPS: (Sales Pitch)
>
>Blogging Super Affiliate Becomes A New Dad And Drops His Guard To Reveal The Hidden Secrets To Earning Up To $1860.11 Per Day From FREE Blogs And Even Hands You His Underground Software To Make It As Easy As 1-2-3…GUARANTEED
>
>Now You Can Use My Exact Blogging System To Drive Thousands Of Extra Visitors To Your Websites, Affiliate Promotions Or Adsense Pages And Explode Your Income In Under 30 Days…Even If You’ve Never Made A Single Cent Online
>
>Watch the Tricks I Used to Swap my 9-5 job…
>
>… for a part-time web business that pays full-time income.
If you can watch movies & click your mouse you can do this.
Weak *and* sad.

The whole idea of living your life partly on the web, partly in public brings to mind new subtleties to the boundary between public and private. There are all kinds of shades of gray, nuances between what’s utterly private and what we are comfortable sharing with everyone on the planet.
Meanwhile, the available tools are for the most part not yet sophisticated enough to allow us to safely dictate exactly what to reveal and to whom. We are stuck with much more blunt instruments: draft vs. publish and possibly password-protection options or the friends and family spheres available at sites like LiveJournal and Flickr.
At the recently revitalized Blogging Blog (it’s now a group weblog), Stephanie Brail examines this issue in
Fear of Exposure – How Much Disclosure is Too Much?:
> I’ve been blogging on and off for a few years, and also reading various blogs as well. In choosing how much to divulge, consider:
>
> 1. Will this hurt your family and friends?
> 2. Will this put your job in jeopardy?
> 3. Most importantly: Is such a disclosure really interesting anyway?
>
> I believe number three should be the first and foremost consideration when sharing personal information. Personal information done well can be the most engaging, intimate, and powerful form of writing. Personal information done in an indulgent, self-serving way is simply dull and pointless, and it’s that sort of writing that is damn embarrassing.

Catching up with Marc Canter I see that he and his cohorts have unveiled Structured Blogging. Looks interesting. I’ll need to try out the plugin(s) to see if the data-entry overhead makes sense for me.
Paul Kedrosky thinks I’m (well, all of us are) too lazy to make it work. He may be right. I may be lazy. But Marc just may be the lunatic we’re looking for.

David D. Perlmutter writes in his Policy by Blog weblog, in an entry called Blogs of War: Then and Now:
> In c. 1300 BCE, the pharaoh Rameses II and his army fought a battle against a Hittite army at Kadesh, in what is now Syria. The battle was a draw; in fact, the Egyptians ended up retreating. But Rameses’ memorial temple–an instance of massive communication–shows on its 100-foot walls pictures and hieroglyphics of the great ruler as victorious. As originally painted, Rameses is bronze skinned, broad shouldered, long armed, resolute of face, wearing the twin crowns of upper and lower Egypt, and many times larger than the Hittites and his own men–a superman in the anthropological as well as comic book sense. (Rameses became the “Ozymandias” who, in Shelley’s poem, demanded that all “look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.”) In the written records accompanying the images, Rameses boasts that he personally routed “every warrior of the Hittite enemy, together with the many foreign countries which were with them.”
>
> In contrast, the pharaoh blames his own men for early problems in the battle: “You have done a cowardly deed, altogether. Not one man among you had stood up to assist me when I was fighting. . . not one among you shall talk about his service, after returning to the land of Egypt.” In other words, here was the mighty-thighed Pharaoh announcing that his own men were cowards and he won the battle single-handedly. I have often wondered whether some veteran of Kadesh, walking by the tableaus, did not squint up, shake his head, gnash his teeth, and growl to his wife, “The lying bastard, it was his bad generalship/leadership that lost the day, not our cowardice.” But of course we don’t know; foot soldiers in Pharaoh’s army didn’t carve or write their campaign memoirs; and no scribe or stonemason interviewed them.
By contrast today’s (real) war bloggers are the men and women in country, on bases and in forward positions.
The reference to Ozymandias reminds me of one of my first websites, which ain’t what it used to be.

So I just returned Coffee and Cigarettes and Netflix invites me to give it some stars and maybe review it for my Netflix friends. I guess I can bother to improve their data and their ability to recommend things for me and my friends (not that I’ve ever yet relied on their recommendations), but it sure would be nice if they gave me an easy way to post my rating and review to my blog as well, sort of like the way Flickr lets me post pictures. Sure, I can plug in a badge with my Netflix queue in it. I do that on my personal blog, but I’d like better integration, please.
See also Amazon.

On the Well’s blog conference we were discussing trackback, who likes ‘em and who doesn’t, and a few new bloggers confessed that they didn’t quite grok what trackbacks were really all about. This prompted zorca, aka Suzanne Stefanac, to take a crack at demystifying trackback at her relatively new blog, Dispatches from Blogistan (