The many flip sides of Twitter

I’ve already blogged, as well as having written on of my last, to date, newspaper columns, about the positives of Twitter in Iran, combined with the negatives of American solipsism in thinking you’re “doing something” by passing on Twitter messages or whatever.

But, Twitter has even worse sides.

First, there’s its threat to become a backdoor spam blaster, judging by all the porn-site type Twitter followers that want to latch on to me.

Second, there’s people who see one post of mine that agrees with their raison d’etre for blogging, Tweeting, etc., and they decide to become my followers.

Case in point? I write one post about GMO corn in Europe yesterday, Tweet the blog post, and now I have a follower who’s an anti-vaccination, anti-modern medicine conspiracy theorist.

Get ready to get spammed more?

Virginia’s Supreme Court ruled Friday that the state’s anti-spam law was unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds and ordered notorious spammer Jeremy Jaynes freed from prison. That didn’t please the state:

Lawyers for the state had argued that the First Amendment doesn't apply because the Virginia law bars trespassing on privately owned e-mail servers through phony e-mail routing and transmission information. The court rejected that characterization of the law.

Attorney General Bob McDonnell promised to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The journalist in me appreciates the support for the First Amendment, and also can’t see how spam e-mail is significantly different from junk snail mail. (Virginia is the only state in the country with a law against non-commercial spam e-mail.)

If all the spammers wishing me Merry Christmas …

Were real people, I’d be surrounded by a million friends.

Kevin Drum gets in a huff when taken to task about troll-spam on Political Animal

How hard is it for a paid “professional” blogger to have a spam-controlling comments feature?

Apparently it’s just too much for either Kevin Drum, blogger of the political magazine Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, or WM’s editorial masters.

In the last week or so, his blog comments have gotten hugely overrun by long-winded trolls and thread hijackers.

I e-mailed Kevin, and sent a separate e-mail to WM contact e-mails, requesting they install some anti-spam comments features. I said that, if not, I could delink Political Animal, one of just two high-hit liberal blogs on my linkroll. And that I could post to his blog suggesting other bloggers do the same, even if the action were nothing more than symbolic.

Drum e-mailed back in high dudgeon. When I sent a second e-mail saying it was nothing personal, but that, even as a symbol, I couldn’t think of how else to stress the issue. Ironically, Drum had a blog post two days ago about how spam volume has doubled in the last year.

Well, troll comments on posts are akin to spam.

And, he and/or his masters don’t even have to pay to fix this.

I added to my blogs the Haloscan comments software, which is free, in large part because it does give me some comments control. Haloscan has a maximum length limit on comments, and … it lets me ban posters by IP address. Enough said.

So, Kevin, if you want to get all huffy, fine. I’ll go ahead and take care of the linkage issue now.