It’s a new day and the sun is shining, I spent some time playing with my kids before starting work – I should be in a good mood.

Except I’m not… I’m actually feeling quite insecure – and one of the reasons is the comments I get about this blog.

Last week I wrote a piece about getting Vodafone Mobile Connect working on a Mac. In that post I linked to someone who had managed to speak to a suitably skilled technician at Vodafone who talked him through the process of installing the application as the root user. Thankfully that person blogged about their experience, I found his post on the ‘net and it helped me, so I did my bit to spread the message. Then somebody (for whom I can apply several four-letter words… but I won’t in public) leaves a comment which says:

“This bears no resemblance to my experiences. I have installed VCM [sic] on about 100 Mac Laptops now and have never, ever had to use the method you describe.

The standard installation works fine and is a hassle free process.

I get the feeling you are making a simple installation process complicated by looking for problems where there are none.

Your advice is incorrect and you really should not attempt to act as a source of knowledge on subjects you know nothing about.”

Well, great, 15 years in IT (not including the time spent in education before that), over 1300 posts on this blog, some of which have apparently been useful to others, and now the insults start to arrive. I responded, then stewed about it for a while, before deciding that I have better things to worry about and to ignore the comments… until I heard that my efforts aren’t necessarily appreciated by technology companies either…

…a few weeks back, I was sent some information from a (very large) technology company in which the e-mail said “please cascade as appropriate”. I thought that the information would be of interest to people reading the blog (even though there’s a lot of stuff I chose not to write about) but it seems that some people in the company thought I had breached an NDA (I did not and would not – indeed I have many blog posts stored up that I can’t publish yet because of such agreements) and that small blogs (written by real people) shouldn’t be reporting things that company blogs (written by marketing departments) should be spinning. I double-checked my source – it definitely said cascade as appropriate, which meant I was in the clear – phew! (Furthermore, thankfully, there are people inside that technology company who have been prepared to defend my position).

Right now it seems that I have a blog which is neither small enough to just take a few hours a week, nor large enough to pay the bills. If I write about real world experiences with technology, I get flamed by fanboys who tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about; meanwhile if I write about technology subjects that are less “hands on”, then the companies those posts relate to get jumpy. It seems I can’t win.

I spend a huge about of time writing on this blog and if I work out how much it pays me then it’s well below the minimum wage so it’s certainly not worth it from a financial perspective. I used to find the writing therapeutic but now it’s just something else that I don’t have time for in my day. I need a break… especially if all I’m doing is creating Internet noise. It would be a shame to undo 5 years’ work and to pack it in, but sometimes really do I wonder why I bother…

As I write this, Akismet is telling me that it has trapped 1988 spam comments in the last 7 days and Bad Behavior has blocked a further 5437 access attempts from known “bad” IP addresses over the same period. That’s pretty alarming – given that this is a pretty small blog run by one bloke in his spare time (albeit one with quite a lot of posts)… thank goodness I have these tools to help me out (I’ve long since given up checking for false positives).

I do moderate comments on the blog and some of the spammers are pretty blatant – stuff with suspect links like the spam e-mails we all get in our Inbox – but, as far as I know, none of those are live on the site. There are others that are more devious and, despite my rules for comments being pretty clear that I don’t welcome blog spam, if their product links are relevant to the discussion, then I’ll generally turn a blind eye (although one guy did repeatedly spam me to promote his product and then had the nerve to e-mail and request a direct link – as you can imagine, my answer was not a positive one).

Then, this afternoon, I noticed a very sly spammer. Some time back, I wrote a post that commented on how, after Nationwide Building Society suffered the theft of a notebook PC with several million customer records, they wrote to my two-year-old son and asked him to show the letter to his parent or guardian! I (somewhat provocatively) titled the post “a lack of business intelligence” and this seems to have grabbed the attention of a blog spammer…

You see, when someone leaves a comment on this blog, WordPress tells me their IP address (as detailed in the privacy policy and data protection notice for this site). I’ve removed the commenter’s personal details but do you notice anything strange about the following comment?

Author : [name removed] (IP: [IP address removed] , inetgw04.unx.sas.com)
E-mail : [e-mail address removed]
URL :
Whois : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=[IP address removed]
Comment:
I have just taken a job as a CIO at midsize corporation and have been tasked with implementing BI within the organiztion. This is new territory for me as I was working at a smaller company basically insuring that the essential computing infrasture was in place to insure day to day operations. One book I was going to mention that has been helpful to me is Business Intelligence Books – Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App [link removed]. I would be intersted to hear what others are reading out there.

It’s the reverse lookup on the IP address that gives it away. So you are a CIO at a midsize corporation are you? Well your e-mail seems to have coming from a pretty large business intelligence company (although it’s not clear what they have to do with the book that is being promoted).

It’s not the first time that a large company has spammed this blog. After I criticised Dell for their customer service (and to be fair they worked hard to rectify the situation – for which I gave them credit at the time), someone called “Anonymous” left a comment which linked to a forum post showing HP in a negative light. I smelt a rat and checked their IP address – sure enough it was registered to Dell Computer Corporation.

I really do hate blog spam…

Many organisations have realised the value of blogging from a corporate marketing perspective but I’ve recently gained first hand experience of blogging as a social networking tool.  In general, any relationships formed as a result of blogging activities are online (whilst other tools such as LinkedIn attempt to convert personal relationships into more complex social networks) but I keep bumping into people that actually read the stuff that I write here!

Earlier this month, over lunch at the UK highlights from the Microsoft Management Summit event, I realised that the chap sitting next to me had left a comment on this blog a few weeks back and we got talking (Hi Dan); then, tonight I was back at Microsoft for a TechNet event about Windows PowerShell, where another chap introduced himself and said that he reads my blog (Hi Mike).  It’s happened before too – I work for a very large organisation and a couple of colleagues have commented that they knew me from my blog before they met me.

Now, just to keep my ego in check, I should remember that this blog’s readership is not enormous (although it has grown steadily since I started tracking the metrics) but bearing in mind that must of what I write is just my notes for later re-use, it’s really good when someone says “hello” and lets me know that they’ve found something I wrote to be useful.

Earlier this week, I added a contact form to the site and I still allow comments on posts (even if 95% of the comments are spam, I get some good feedback too).  So, feel free to get in touch if you like what you see here.  I can’t promise to write on a particular subject as that’s not the way this blog works (I write about my technology experiences and they, by their very nature, are unplanned) but it’s good to know that sitting here in my hotel room writing something late at night is not a complete waste of time.

Moving back to the social engineering point for a moment; it’s worth pointing out that the blogroll on this site is (XFN is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks).