So I've been very busy the past few months. Barely time to do anything but seeing clients, working and lapping a little sunshine now and then. The farthest from Sweden I got was to Oslo (Norway) to spend a week there hanging out with friends and trying not to think about how expensive it was.

User submitted content is one of the defining features of our new "2.0" world wide web. Sites that depend entirely on content produced by its visitors are being acquired every day and no frequent user of the Internet could have failed to hear about sites such as MySpace, Digg and YouTube. But user submitted content is of varying quality, especially when it expresses an evaluation of something, such as a review or a blog entry. It has become more important than ever to be able to tell quacks from the real doctors.

I am selling two of my high potential domain names, forumthemes.org and bbstyles.net. Both have high search engine ranking - each has a Google PageRank of 5 and 60,000 inbound links (according to Urltrends). Forumthemes.org has an avg of 1,800 unique visitors per month (according to Webalizer), and bbstyles.net has an avg of 1,300 unique visitors per month, numbers that have so far been increasing by 20-30% every month. These sites have great growth potential and already steady high traffic and are perfect platforms for any style, template, skin or theme related website or business.

To make on offer on them, go to forumthemes.org and bbstyles.net.

I've been posting earlier about spam, and the measures taken to stop it, as well as the counter-measures taken by spammers. It's a war that has civilian casualties just like any other war, and in this case the users are the civilians. The measures to prevent spam introduce captchas and other methods which are making websites less and less usable and accessible, methods that make using many sites become a challenge for many.

When the idea of the World Wide Web was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee it was the idea of the hypertext web. A network of documents with contextual links forming a mesh of information which supported retrieval and authoring of documents. Today with the popularity of blogs, wikis and the advent of AJAX and realtime interfaces we're seeing the way people use the WWW taking a new direction, a hybrid system that merges the document browser with the application viewer, a hybrid I'd like to call the "hyper-application system".

You might have noticed more and more spam getting through your email filters these days. If you ever read one of these spams you might have seen that instead of text, these spams contain images that are attached to the email. Since OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is decent at best there's no method presently to automatically identify these messages based on their content. However what is highly ironic about it is that anti-spam software has used the same method to stop spam and prevent automated sign ups at websites and forums by so called spambots that post junk and advertising. The hunted is now using the weapon of the hunter...