If I may veer into self-indulgent blog-navel-gazing for a moment, comment spam is a pain in the patoot but it’s kind of interesting to watch it change over time. The tedious robo-blast of 5000 hotlinks per spam seems to have disappeared, but the semi-intelligent comments have replaced them - with sentences that look on casual glance like real comments and can give me pause.

Sometimes context reveals them easily: for example, this comment was placed on the post looking for wikipedia articles about NH geeks: “This is a good point, though from my personal experience so far I have not had a problem.” - obviously canned.

But how about this one, on the post about a grant for the regional nanotech center: “I hoped they will also investigate about climate change.. All of us must be concern on this.. I can’t imagine what will happen to the earth if we ignore this.” I assume it’s software-produced, but cleverly so - climate change shows up alot on this blog, and it’s not outrageous to link it to nanotech. The fact that it is written by “chiropractic seminars”  is another hint; I assume it is placed to increase link traffic and boost Google search scores. That example is particularly interesting because it had a follow-up from another poster (”Digital cameras”) that refers back to it, as if a dialogue is happening: “@chiropractor seminars– you are right I am standing with you. They had a very big responsibility.” That doesn’t really make any sense, but it’s close to making sense.

Interesting. … but annoying, too.