Updates on new changes on this blog, tech­ni­cal setups and what I think are sig­nif­i­cant events that hap­pen on the week.

On this Blog:

Auto­post Madness

1. Removal of captchas for comments.
2. Jour­ney­man Jour­neys video channel.
3. Auto­post madness.

1. Hey Google in the news again — This time some­thing more useful.

Blog Updates

1. Removal of captchas for comments.

A cou­ple of days back, I wrote a post about “Human­iz­ing your Blog”. In it, I wrote about captchas and sug­gested that it should be off, if your are run­ning your own blog. This is to make it eas­ier for read­ers to comment.

Captcha FAIL

Well I did that with this blog. No more . Did my blog get over­ran by spam com­ments? So far so good. All com­ment spam were caught.

Com­ment spam are linked to spam blogs or splogs.

I use Akismet and WP-SpamFree plu­g­ins. This two does a per­fect tango. All auto­mated com­ment spam are caught.

I’m only left to deal with human gen­er­ated spam which is few and far in between.

Do you like/hate captchas? Is it necessary?

2. Video Channel.

Video Star

There, I finally cre­ated a video chan­nel for this blog. The cre­at­ing part was easy. YouTube allows you to choose the col­ors and your pic­ture. Though you are still stuck with one layout.

YouTube have also recently increase the video time from 10 min­utes to 15. Actu­ally to put a video for a good 10 min­utes is challenging.

Now the hard part. Cre­at­ing con­tent. It’s eas­ier to write, video is another thing. Prob­a­bly I’ll start with one video a month.

Now I just need a good dig­i­tal cam­era and lighting.

Do you prefer video or reading? Or a combination?

3. Auto­post Madness.

Ini­tially it sounded like a good idea. Your post or arti­cle writ­ten on a blog (Pos­ter­ous) gets auto­posted to your other social sites as well. Come to think about it, you are spam­ming your own site.

Before Pos­ter­ous came along, I have been using Yahoo Pipes to feed into my Google RSS ReaderTwit­ter­Feed. Now this web ser­vice can aut­ofeed to Twit­ter and Facebook.

always the pipes

In Face­book, you also can get Twit­ter to paste on your wall. And in Word­Press there are plu­g­ins to post to Pos­ter­ous and Tumblr.

The result: Mul­ti­ple feeds that points to the same thing.

Con­fused? So am I.

Now I switched it off. All these autoposting.

I’m now work­ing to stream­line my post into my Face­book Fan­page. I can do this now, because I have lots of orig­i­nal con­tent in my blog.

Would you get confuse, if multiple links point to the same site?

Inter­net Updates

1. Hey Google in the news — This time some­thing more useful.

Google should stick to what it does best. That is bring­ing in ser­vices that changes the inter­net landscape.

Then Gmail. I remem­ber I was excited about it. Finally a seri­ous sound­ing email address. Yahoo just doesn’t cut it and Hot­mail sounded like a gigolo named “Hot Male”.

Now they came out with Google Voice. I did have Skype before and hardly use it. Skype has free calls for PC to PC; for land­lines, you have to pay.

Google Voice on the other hand, allows you to make a land­line call to US and Canada all for free. Isn’t that sweet.

I have a WordPress.com blog that I main­tained. WordPress.com allows post to be called in. This is the post on using Word­Press audio post and how it cost me using my hand­phone.

It’s not a world­wide ser­vice yet. I’ve checked the rates to call other coun­tries and it seemed reasonable.

Have you use Google Voice yet?