Thanks for the feedback; as for the topic of Father Ted…

I tend to keep most spammy trackbacks at bay with the Simple Trackback Validation plugin, but the occasional ones do get through before I delete them.

I think you hit the nail on the head as far as any clever spammers are concerned – if it didn’t pay, they wouldn’t bother. The thing is, for those who are expert at it, it returns far bigger dividends than conventional advertising.

As for search engines and splogs et al, I think you’re probably onto something with the money versus results line of thought

I haven’t had the misfortune of that phenomenum thus far. Technorati is a little weird and skewy these days so perhaps you were just unfortunate to have had experienced one of their many recent brain farts. My recent posts from them in my WP dashboard for example, actually shows my own domain with the same post repeated 4 times in the list! What’s with that I wonder.

As for the trackback thing generally, I guess it’s just one of those things that we all have to live with I guess, just part of the daily housekeeping of running a blog. Not ideal, but as you say, the alternative could well be to both alienate some genuine parties as well as miss out on a good conversational piece or two too.

I would like to know what you think of the track-backs from Technorati? I got hit with a bunch during Christmas and occasionally throughout the period of the normal week… I mark ‘em as spam and almost as soon as Akismet drops them, they end up back in the comments. (very frustrating)

I almost want to turn off track-backs, but also don’t want to offend the people that are relevant and should be displayed…

Any ideas or suggestions?

Heh – the duck…um, well it was initially meant to move back and forth ad infinitum.However as I didn’t set the animation to loop forever the reader (you) by the time he gets to that part of the piece simply sees a static duck, rather than the continially moving target! (I might have to change that )

I agree with your point though David, it ties in nicely with a lot of what I was saying in that this whole Internet web marketing thing is a continually evolving fluid thing. The main difference with stuff on the net, is that it can move very very quickly indeed, what is a busy happening high traffic site today can quickly become an arid wasteland tomorrow.

Anyway, yes, the web is continuing to become more and more commercialized. Everything does. But what’s great is that the social aspect of the internet precludes traditional commercialization.

So we get youtube instead of TV, StumbleUpon instead of classifieds. Perhaps the internet is changing too fast for commercialization, or at least fast enough to stay somewhat neutral.

@Mike – you are welcome, I hope that paint dring fest ending on a cliff edge

I’ve been wanting to write something like this and you did it for me. It points out a conflict of interest that is critical on the web.

On a related note, “bad” web pages can be just as profitable as “bad” SERPs. If a web page is perfect (has exactly the information the reader needs), the reader has no reason to click on an ad, so the CTR and CPM goes down. If a page is useless, on the other hand, an ad might be the best looking thing on the page.

I used to be puzzled by domainer pages… I mean, they’re completely useless… What’s the point? That is the point — people look at them, feel disoriented, and often find it’s easier to click a random link than hit the back button.