I thought I had a good grasp on email spam. Of course you can trick a small percentage of people to click through to a malicious site or download mal-ware. Apparently it’s very lucrative. I understand that and the majority of email clients do a good job of filtering out the bad stuff. What I don’t understand is blog spam. I get over 150 spam comments a day. They are usually gibberish with random links to anything from Viagra to acai berry vitamins. A little insight: my blog gets less than 20 visitors a day. 20 visitors. The fact that I get so little traffic, but deal with so many spam comments confuses me. How is that valuable to a spammer? Their links get marked as spam almost immediately and no one is looking at them anyway. I finally had to turn off auto-approving comments because every single comment I got was more crap.

If someone knows why this practice is valuable to a spammer, could you please leave a real comment below? I need to figure this out.

One of my favorite things to think about when I’m starting a project that seems really big is from the guys at 37 Signals – The best way to graduate from beginner is to get in way over your head. It feels scary when you have to do something that you’ve never done before, but how the hell else do you learn? You can study all day on the “right” way to do things, but until you get in there, you’ll never really know. Practice might not make perfect, but it makes better. So I’m going to keep jumping in the deep end and learning more every time.

UPDATE: Marissa Mayer, Glamour’s 2009 Woman of the Year and Google VP of Search & User Development agrees with me and 37 Signals as well:

Get in a bit over your head,” she says. “That’s how you grow and learn and stretch yourself.”

Hi,
I noticed that Fox airs shows online after 8 days. This is counter-intuitive to what you’re trying to accomplish. If you want people to tune in via their TVs than they have to catch up on episodes they’ve missed. If you changed the airing online to 6 days or possibly an hour before the NEXT episode, you’d get more people tuning in via TV where ads are more lucrative for you.
Hope you consider this.

I thought, at the very least they would have a low-level Fox community organizer send me an actual response either thanking me for the suggestion or telling me to mind my own business. Instead, I got a seemingly robot-generated email listing fox.com’s policies on online viewing. Here’s what they said:

Dear ,
The episodes listed on the site are the only ones currently available for viewing. The posting of some episodes may be delayed at least 8 days due to contractual obligations.

To select an episode, click on their episode’s picture below the video stage. You must wait until the first commercial for a given episode has played before you can select a different episode. Use the arrows to the top right of the listed episodes to see additional episode selections.

Not all Fox television shows are available for viewing on fox.com. To request that additional programming be made available, please contact askfox@fox.com. Be sure to include the specific show and episode to which you are referring.
Sort of helpful, but I had just taken the time to point out a flaw in fox’s logic: I’ll never catch up on episodes if they wait 8 days to stream an episode online.

I had used a form on fox.com’s website. I was under the impression that my email would go to fox. I learned after checking the email address that it actually came from Move Networks, the company that handles fox’s video streaming. It seems like such a simple thing to get wrong. When a user of your website has a question/concern/problem, you should want that email. You should crave that information. Sadly, Fox does not. I have contacted askfox@fox.com, but received no reply as of yet. Hopefully they remedy this online viewing policy, but until than I’ll always be a week behind the rest of the world in House.