Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog posted an entry recently titled Bookmark a blog? Are you nuts? In his post, Kevin addresses an issue that I encounter on a regular basis: people who read blogs via their bookmarks. Kevin says:

Bookmarking blogs would only be done by someone with a lot of time on their hands. You know, here’s a lot of bookmarks on my browser and I spend all day going back to blogs I like to see if they posted anything new. ‘Nope, nothing new today, I’ll check back tomorrow and now on to the next blog in my bookmarks.’

You subscribe to blogs. You do not bookmark them. When a new post is made to a blog you like, the new post will automatically be streamed to your newsreader where you collect RSS feeds from other blogs, news sites, and keywords & key phrases you follow from Google Blog Search.

The busiest people in this country read blogs. It’s not the people with time to kill that browse around to blogs. They read blogs because they can get targeted information fed to them.

It’s a search, browse, and subscribe Internet society today folks. We’ve moved on from the search and browse world.

I could not agree more. I will admit that it took me a few months to switch from reading blogs via bookmarks to reading blogs via an RSS reader. Once I made the switch, however, I realized how stupid I had been trying to keep up with my blogs via bookmarks.

RSS technology exists to make our lives easier and more efficient. Use the technology to your benefit.

If you are wondering what I am talking about when I talk about RSS, check out this post I did a few months ago that explains RSS in plain English.

When you don’t currently use and RSS reader, go to Google Reader, sign up for an account, and start subscribing to your blogs.

Here is an interesting post from Speaking Freely about Five Things to do with a PC When You Do Not Have an Internet Connection.

My favorite of the list is probably the first tip:

1. Clean out and categorize your bookmarks. I don’t know about you, but I tend to just click ‘bookmark this page’ and call it good. Yesterday, when I hit the little ‘down arrow’ on Firefox to let the bookmark list scroll down I counted. Not sites, but seconds. 11 seconds worth of scrolling bookmarks is way too many. If you haven’t visited a site in a month it’s not important.

Create categories and organize the list of bookmarks after you’ve eliminated all those links you don’t need. Do not create a miscellaneous category. Catch-all categories do exactly that and soon become difficult to use.

His other suggestions are good as well. I would like to add one additional tip that he did not mention: organizing your email. I use Outlook for my email. I find that downtime is a great time to sort and file any email that I have not yet sorted. Also, it is a great time to archive my email using Adobe Acrobat’s email archiving feature.

A tip of the hat to Futurelawyer for the link.

I saw today that currently 95% of all email is spam. Given the amount of spam that still gets through my spam filters, I have no trouble believing this.

One of the spam issues that surprises me, however, is the amount of comment spam that I get on this blog. Fortunately, I use a comment spam filter called Akismet. It works really well and I usually have to manually delete comment spam only once or twice a week.

I checked my  Akismet setting just a little while ago. It’s been about a week since I cleaned it out. In that last week, Akismet caught 2,039 2,040 spam comments.

I am not quite sure what these spambots think they are going to accomplish. I am glad, however, that Akismet is doing a great job of keeping almost all of the comment spam off of the blog.

I am still not quite sure what I would ever use this for. However, it is really neat and someone clearly put a lot of time and effort into creating it.

My personal rule of thumb is that I try not to post anything on the internet that I would not want my grandmother to read. It appears that Dr. Robert Lindeman should have followed this advice.

According to this news story in the Boston Globe, it appears that Dr. Lindeman was anonymously blogging about the malpractice suit that he was a defendant in. Apparently the posts on the blog were not complimentary to the proceedings, the jurors, or plaintiff’s counsel.

During plaintiff’s examination of Dr. Lindeman, plaintiff’s counsel asked the doctor if he was the anonymous blogger known as flea. Dr. Lindeman admitted that he was. This admission was apparently sufficient to raise some concerns of the effect that the blog might have on the case. According to the Globe’s story, the morning after Dr. Lindeman admitted that he was flea, he settled the malpractice action for “what members of Boston’s tight-knit legal community describe as a substantial settlement.”

I see two morals to this story. First, follow my grandmother rule. Don’t say something you don’t want repeated to the world with your name attached to it. Second, just because you think you are blogging anonymously, that does not mean that your readers do not know who you are.

Bruce Schneier points us to a story from a person who decided to see how many people would click on a Google Adwords link that was designed to infect the user’s computer with malware.

The author explains:

Last fall, my attention got caught by a small book on Google Adwords at our local library. Turns out it’s very easy to setup an ad and manage the budget. You can start with a couple of euros per month. And that gave me an idea: this can be used with malicious intend. It’s a way to get a drive-by download site on the first page of a search result (FYI, I’ve reported on other ways to achieve this). So I started an experiment…

1. I bought the drive-by-download.info domain. .info domains are notorious for malware hosting.
2. I setup a web server to display a simple page saying “Thank you for your visit!” and to log each request. That’s all. I want to be absolutely clear about this: no malware or other scripts/code were ever hosted on this server. No PCs were harmed in this experiment.
3. I started a Google Adwords campaign with several combinations of the words “drive by download” and the aforementioned ad, linking to drive-by-download.info
4. I was patient for 6 months

The ad that he placed appears to the right.

One would think that no one would click on an ad that actually advertised that by so doing, you would infect your machine. It turns out, however, that there are some people who will. The author explains:

During this period, my ad was displayed 259,723 times and clicked on 409 times.

Although 409 out of 259,723 is a low click through rate. On the other hand, I have to wonder why anyone (let alone 409 anyones) would click on an ad that advertised that it would infect your computer.
Just you would not leave your car with a person wearing a sign that said “Give me your car keys: I want to steal your car,” don’t go to a website that says “Bring me your computer, I want to infect it.”

Obviously, you cannot avoid all attempts by people to attempt to harm you, whether in real life or on the internet. However, you should exercise caution. Just as you know the parts of town you want to exercise caution when driving through in the middle of the night, know the types of websites that you want to exercise caution when clicking on an internet link.