blogging

Like many other people, I received an email this morning announcing that Mollom, a project of Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, is out of beta. I use Mollom on this website, as well as another personal one, to reduce and sometimes outright eliminate blog comment spam. In my configuration, Mollom works by using heuristics against blog comments and if they are considered spammy enough, the user is challenged to a simple CAPTCHA system to prove that they are not an automated spammer.

Mollom is a great system, since some studies (direct PDF link) have shown that as much as 75% of all attempted comments on blogs are spam!

I've been using Mollom for a few months and have been very happy with it. If you run a blog, even one that isn't in Drupal, I would encourage you to check it out. It's free for many uses, so you lose nothing by at least giving it a shot. There is a developer API and Mollom has already made downloadable integration available for Drupal, WordPress, and Joomla, as well as language-specific libraries.

Congratulations to Dries and the Mollom team! I look forward to the system only getting better as more and more folks start to use it.

Update: A couple folks asked if I'd mind posting my Mollom statistics graph, so you can find it here. There were many hundreds of spams stopped in the past month!

With today's Blog Action Day about the environment, I won't go into a long entry, but instead I want to impart a simple concept that really struck me when I saw a pre-screening of The 11th Hour here in DC in August.

The concept is this: that conventional economics is based upon the assumption that the natural environment is an infinite resource: timber, ores, water, animals to kill, and even places to bury things. While this may have seemed to be the case even 100 years ago, today it is patently not the case at all.

That's it. I try to think daily about which of my actions (and my business' actions) operate under this assumption and how I can correct that. Whether it's by better researching products and services, relying almost entirely on mass transit day-to-day, or making my opinion known to my representatives, this is on my mind every day. Ours and future generations must understand this concept or we are doomed.

For more environmentally-oriented thoughts, see EWG's Enviroblog, particularly today's Blog Action Day entry, Know Your Source, regarding the mainstream media and environmental reporting.