Comment spammers are relentless. I have not posted to DaveWrites recently, but I spend time every day just deleting the comments that make it through Akismet and other spam filters.

I believe the spam-filtering service Akismet defeats most automated spam, but I suspect there is a class of low-wage human-powered spamming going on based on some internet marketer's idea of link building.

The reason some people post short comments like "Nice job. Keep up good work." or "Good information, thanks for the post!" is because the comment form gives them the opportunity to link to another web site. That link becomes a part of my blog because it is published with the comment. This a legitmate way to build connections between bloggers. When I comment on someone else's blog that has much more traffic than mine, I hope that people will check out my site to see what else I'm writing.

But the reason spammers comment on blogs is to improve search engine rankings. Links from blogs to web sites increase the ranking of those sites, because search engines believe sites with many inbound links are more authoritative and creditable. So a business might pay a marketing firm to go out and comment on all the blogs they can find. Then, they report back to the company: "we've generated 100 inbound links for you!"

The sad thing about such an approach--apart from my annoyance at these bozos--is that it is a fraudulent scam on the companies who are paying the "internet marketing firm." Read Google's opinion of comment spam on their blog. The message from Google is clear:

• it does not work; they will detect it and ignore it
• it can hurt you; they will penalize sites that use it

My simplistic description of how inbound links affect search engine ranking is NOT very accurate. Google has spent the last decade refining their algorithms for ranking sites. So it is not as simple as getting some links.

None of this is new. I've been deleting comments like this for years, and I try to avoid even thinking about it because it is a distraction from working on something that might actually generate some revenue for my business. But I think all bloggers should review Google's recommendations on how to fight comment spam just to make sure they are not just hitting the snooze button every day for years. Let's walk through Google's recommendations with some real world practical commentary...

I think the CAPTCHA and Akismet approaches are the most worthwhile to pursue. Many of us set up our sites years ago and it's worth a review of the technologies available to update our sites to make sure we are minimizing the amount of predictible spam, then, just delete those bogus comments that slip through.

This post turned into more than a few minutes diversion...feel free to submit your own comments and links to practical ways to fight spam. I'm sure this post will itself create a moderation challenge for me. :)

Here's a peek at what I've been up to at Heroix, where I'm blogging about my experiences in the technology trenches. The items below are excerpts from the longer entries...click on over to the Heroix blog to read the rest of the story...

Social media strategists and consultants should take a good look at the Salesforce platform as a complement to activities like blogging, twitter, and facebook. Until I spoke with John Durocher, a VP at Salesforce who specializes in the Financial Services Industry, I thought of Salesforce as strictly a CRM product. But what Salesforce is doing with their Ideas application--and their cloud computing approach, could be the next level of customer engagement.

According to Vida Killian, Dell's IdeaStorm manager, Dell's Digital Media Vision is to "engage in relevant conversations with out customers online, 24/7, worldwide in all major languages." After some initial missteps, Dell began blogging and working to engage customers in the social media space with their Direct2Dell blog launched in June 2006. IdeaStorm was launched earlier this year as an augmentation of Dell's social media strategy to move from one to one conversations to one to many collaboration opportunities.

IdeaStorm provides Dell customers with the opportunity to suggest improvements to the product and see those suggestions become a part of the product development cycle. To date, over 10,000 ideas have been generated and a visit to the site will show what ideas are currently bubbling to the top of the list.

The video below gives a very quick (1 minute) view of how IdeaStorm works to move ideas into reality:

Salesforce has launched a number of demo and early implementation sites using the Ideas application. Dell's IdeaStorm and MyStarbucksIdea are the first sites to fully implement what Salesforce describes (perhaps too "corporatistically") as "community in a box," but if we leap past the rather non-organic connotations of that moniker, we find the proof is in the practicality that these sites are working to serve their purpose: generating ideas from the user community.

It is probably too early to tell if these applications are working, but what I find intriguing is how the Salesforce approach offers the potential to leapfrog over many implementation details and get a relevant conversation started quickly.

John compared what Salesforce is doing with applications as akin to an iTunes store for applications--the AppExchange allows a business to quickly try out applications to see if they were effective or not and then move on to others. That sounds expensive, but then consider how expensive it is to "dabble" in social media. My favorite caveat I've learned is that new media initiatives are "easy to start, but hard to finish." It takes about an hour to get a blog started. But then, you realize that the theme you chose is not so great and you want to customize things a bit so you start messing around with the css. You download a bunch of plugins and maybe even edit the php code a bit because you need it to do something differently. When you are doing this in the comfort of your home as a fun learning experience, it's no big deal. But when it becomes work...and people are not just reading it but wanting to know if it is working...it's not so easy after all.

I think Salesforce is different from just "better tools." There are plenty of products out there designed to allow "non-technical" people to make web things. In the web 1.0 world it was all about creating a WYSIWYG web page editor. In web 2.0 maybe it was Drupal. But ultimately, you find the people maintaining the sites are either technical or became pretty technical pretty fast because they needed to.

Instead of asking communicators to become programmers...or trying to build the perfect tool set for them...what if we could create simple plug in applications to do certain clearly defined tasks? OK, IdeaStorm may not be as "authentic sounding" as a blog by a product manager engaging in one-on-one conversations with customers...but it is more likely to be effective, certainly in larger organizations where the challenge is how to integrate so many smaller ideas into a larger product. Ideastorm may not provide the direct connection that some support rep twittering and fixing your problem on the fly does. But isn't it the next level? Isn't this the essence of truly and authentically involving customers and developers in the process of creating products that truly meet their needs?

I'm also excited by the potential community/government uses for these apps. When I set up WestwoodBlog I chose the Drupal platform mainly because I thought I would be getting multiple residents to blog as they do at myDedham. I wanted more community "plumbing" than Wordpress offered a year ago. But as I start to think about how my site could play a larger role in improving town communication, I run into two types of limits:

1. Time - I need to keep my editorial voice going, I need to invest time to keep my "ear to the ground," and do behind the scenes activity to encourage involvement.
2. Technology - I need to turn myself into a Drupal developer to get some features I'd like to have. How about a simple form to report a streetlight out? I'm sure Drupal has some ugly UI-challenged way to do that, but even if I don't do any real programming work, it is not something I can just "try out."

Salesforce makes their platform available to nonprofits for free. There is still solution architecting work to be done, but it would be a great abstraction to be able to say, ok, turn on the trouble-ticketing system for that...or use the ideas application to gather input for pedestrian and bike saftey. I will have to investigate further and see if there is something I can use here.

To take it a step even further...this is the kind of development we need to make large scale cooperation work. I can foresee so many initiatives becoming bogged down in the detail of running a blog and keeping up with community management issues. I suspect this kind of software approach could save tons of time and money in projects like what Boston World Partnerships is doing to create a community to promote economic development in Boston.

I don't think there is really such a thing as a "community in a box," but it would make a lot more sense to serve specific functions with specific applications than to try to extend the conversational value of social media too far into implementation details. A blog is not the ideal place to report a broken streetlight because the tendency will be to simply talk more about it and no one will likely go fix it. Pretty soon, people get tired of just talking. Integrated applications could deliver the results that make conversation meaningful and relevant to customers and constituents.

I have several posts in the pipeline that I have not had time to edit and publish. But in the meantime, I wanted to test embedding a video from bigthink. Some of their interviews are great, some are not, but I found this piece by Dan Gilbert to be engaging...

On Friday, we're planning to load up the minivan and drive 600 miles to visit the grandparents. My Mom was going to come up to Boston in February, right after Marshall was born, but she fell and broke her hip and hasn't had a chance to meet Marshall yet.

Planning a drive from Boston to Virginia brings back fond, faded memories of 20 years ago when such a drive was done alone, all night, with a pack of Lucky Strikes and cooler full of Coca-Cola...back when gas was perhaps $1/gallon. Lots of things have changed since then.

Back then, it was an adventure; I had flown to Boston after high school to attend MIT and generally flown cheap flights back and forth until one summer when I had a car. My high school friend and I drove up from VA, and I drove back and forth a few times marking the landmarks and getting a feel for the size of the East Coast. Later, my wife and I would drive across country, back and forth at least half a dozen times, and I always felt the drive helped me really get a feel for the size of our country and a sense of what lies between.

But this time, it's a different type of adventure. It will be a two-day trip; we leave Friday evening with a goal of crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge and getting to a hotel before midnight. Then up early to push through a no-traffic morning past Baltimore, DC, Richmond and deep into the heart of Virginia. Oh yeah, we also have a 4-month old, a 2 1/2 yr old, and a 4 yr old who will be sharing this adventure with us. Hope they sleep. I need to burn a few more copies of Wonder Pets and Max and Ruby before we leave...

But one thing that is easier this time is planning the route. Google Maps has changed everything with the following enhancements in the past year or so...that really work:

• Adjusting your route - after doing the basic from/to driving directions, you can click on any part of the route and drag it to an alternate route. While you drag, the route changes to recalculate an optimal route through the point you are selecting and displays the distance and time. Google had me going straight down 95, across the Cross Bronx Expressway and George Washington Bridge, and continuing down 95. I know, from folklore and experience, that route is a bad idea unless it's 2am. So I can pull the route over to Nyack and force a route through Tappan Zee--adding a few miles, but bypassing the core New York City nightmare and routing me down the path I recall--the Garden State Parkway all the way down to rejoin the New Jersey Turnpike farther down.
• Traffic prediction - the really new thing I discovered was Google's new predictive traffic feature. You can select the traffic button on a map of a major metro area to display color coded maps showing current traffic conditions (i.e. red lines indicate stop and go). I noticed a link to Live Traffic/change and found I could set the day of week and time to see Google's prediction of traffic delays. I could use this to decide whether it is worthwhile to plot a bypass of Hartford, how much of a detour across Tappan Zee is worthwhile to get me out of the core mess in NYC, and what to expect coming back.

There's much we cannot plan. Maybe the kids will sleep a lot. Maybe there will be much crying. We've done drives to the Adirondacks and sometimes that has been a 5 1/2 hour drive with mostly sleeping. But because this trip involves 4 separate days of travel, it is kind of like the NBA finals--but it's a 4-game series we want to sweep.

One of my challenges at work is to effectively utilize a company that manages our internet servers. In an ideal world, if there is a problem at 3am, they take care of it so I don't every have to carry a pager. But the ideal world is far from reality.

A couple of incidents this weekend illustrate the difference in motivation vs. expertise.

The first incident -- I received a phone call that our IT company thought our servers were slow. My phone had been turned off, so by the time I got the message, they had already called down the escalation matrix to someone else and the problem appeared to go away on its own. But I felt bad that I had missed the call and started watching my email a little more carefully until I heard a series of new emails come in indicating another problem. I logged on to the server, noticed it was a real problem this time, then reset the server. I emailed the IT company; they had noticed it too, but it seemed intermittent to them.

Tomorrow, we have our regularly scheduled monthly meeting and I'm sure we'll talk more about monitoring and troubleshooting, but I really wonder if we can ever expect a consultant to have that same feeling--the cold sweat that breaks out when the pager goes off and the sense of urgency--that you need to get on that server and get things working again before you start getting emails, pagers alerts, and phone calls from the CEO. I hate that feeling, but as long as the buck stops with me, I feel like I have to have that mindset.

Our IT company has tons more experience than I do. But I have been on the operational front lines of internet technology for almost 13 years now and became very resourceful out of necessity. I'm an intuitive person and when I sense a problem, it usually is real. Contractors just look at the data and don't see anything conclusive.

Part of the challenge in working with a consultant is to give them the tools they need and the authority to do what is necessary...and we are still working on that. They don't know how to restart the application. They don't know how to tell if there is an application problem happening and to them, if the cpu and memory are ok and the web page loads, it is fine. So we fine tune things...but it is very bureaucratic feeling. They have a complicated escalation matrix and all sorts of rules to standardize their approach and allow them to support us through a 24x7 Network Operations Center. But I think I'll still be getting that call at 3am.

A second incident was an email our tech team received late Friday night from our lead consultant developer (different company). He had noticed a problem on our testing site from a new build he delivered Friday afternoon, logged in, figured out the problem, wrote a fix, and deployed the fix then emailed us all with the resolution. Wow. That's the kind of contractor I want!

Now not to take anything away from Mike's technical ability--he is great--but what he did was so much better than just being an expert. He cared enough to anticipate that his help would be needed. He was motivated.

I think for a startup...and I hesitate to say this because it digs my own grave...the idea of outsourcing IT operations is not best for the company. If we are going to host a 24x7 service that is revenue generating, we need a person who not only sweats bullets when the pager goes off, but leaps into action to solve the problem and then figures out how to make sure it never happens again. We can't have monthly status checks and problems that go on for 60 minutes or more while someone calls down the chain of command to find someone who can do something.

On the other hand, our experience with our software developer consultants illustrates that it is possible to create that working relationship where motivation and pride pushes someone who is not a direct employee to go the extra mile. It is not too much to ask or expect. But I still have to figure out how to ask it effectively.

I swore this blog was not about "lifehacks" or productivity tools...but when I searched for how to do this task, I found outdated advice on lifehacker, so I had to write my own...

Suppose that you have decided to embrace the web, so to speak, and want to use Google Mail to replace your existing desktop-based Outlook. In my case, I have Verizon downloading to Outlook 2003. Sometimes I use their terrible netmail to access my email remotely. I also have my phone set up to download new mail. Annoyances abound but the key limitations are:

• If I forget and leave the outlook client open on my home pc, then all new mail is immediately downloaded there, so I can't see it on my phone or via the web form.
• Once the mail is in my desktop client, I lose the ability to reply to people or access the history of conversations remotely.
• The verizon netmail client is buggy; countless composed emails have been lost due to session timeouts.

I determined that I could use GMail and set it up to fetch my verizon mail into the GMail account, and I could also configure GMail to send emails from my verizon account. But I really wanted to upload all the old email and contact information into GMail to make the search and contact stuff useful.

I found an article on lifehacker, but it's a mess. Some guy wrote a tool that will upload mBox formatted email (what's that?) from Thunderbird (what's that?). So, you can download another tool to convert your .pst files into mbox format...yuck. Headache city. Then, I did more searching and found this longer article that takes a long time to describe what is actually a fairly simple and brilliant workaround.

Microsoft Outlook allows you to set up multiple email accounts with multiple protocols. For example, you could have an Exchange mailbox (work) and a POP-based server (home). You could also attach Outlook to an IMAP mail server...Google supports IMAP for accessing the othwerwise web-based email. So here is the solution:

Enable IMAP support in your Gmail account, then add that account to your Outlook client. Then, drag and drop the email from your existing accounts into GMail.

Here is the step-by-step how-to:

Configure GMail to use their Mail Fetcher to retrieve and send mail through your POP account (e.g. verizon):

• Login to GMail
• Click on the Settings link at top right
• Click on Accounts tab
• Under "Get mail from another account" click "add..."
• see the Mail Fetcher link above for help

Note the checkbox to "leave mail on server." When you are ready to have GMail be your primary mode of email, you will want to uncheck that box so the mail does not accumulate at Verizon (because you will no longer be running Outlook and downloading it.).

This step achieves what I already had on my phone and through the Verizon netmail. Now to do the fun stuff.

• Enable IMAP in GMail: Settings, Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, Enable IMAP.
• Now, open Outlook and add a new account:
• choose Tools, Email Accounts to start the wizard
• select Add a new email account, Next
• choose IMAP, Next
• To complete these configuration screens, you should consult the documentation on the google site for your particular Outlook (or other) client. See these configuration instructions from Google, or more help on IMAP from Google
• When you complete and finish the new account wizard, you will see a new folder icon for imap.google.com at the top level of your Outlook folders. Now, you can exlore that folder, just like any other, and move email messages back and forth.

After setting this up, I selected 2000+ emails from my local inbox and dragged them across to GMail, a process that took over an hour to complete over a high speed connection. If you have a large amount of email...do it in manageable chunks. And be judicious about what you move--I just wanted to seed google with the most recent stuff to give me something I could search and tag and start using effectively. I also copied my sent items folder contents to the GMail sent items folder.

Actually using GMail is a subject for another tutorial--and I am sure there are plenty out there. But I found this approach of transferring my email gave me something useful to work with and eased the transition.