clickety-click

It is always trickier being on the road and blogging. Sometimes it is the nature of hotel and other connections, or perhaps the device being used to blog.

A couple of interesting situations emerged. One was that something in my travel kit is intercepting location services to tell a phone service to call me with those unhelpful traffic management insurance claims.

Another is the continued emergence of spambots blasting my comments trail, in an attempt to improve their rankings. It was noticeable when one of those comments came in, because it had not filtered the comment script and I could see the entirety of the fake comments neatly arrayed, along with their parameter-substitute words.

The software to create these form of comments is readily available for around $35, and in a single pass it will identify 500+ sites and then bombard them with automatically formatted comments. Watch out for self-proclaimed Search Engine Optimisation specialists. Snake oil salesmen.

Then, where the labour force is cheap, there's another way to do this. With click-farms, which connect dozens to hundreds of mobile phones together to 'like' a single post, or cultivate a presence.

The next election should be interesting when the combined forces of clickfarms and spambots support the various candidates.