Wiki Spam
Today I had my first wiki spam. Wasn’t much, just rolled back a couple of pages and blocked the IP address with reason set to “Spamming Scum”. This is becoming a serious problem for a lot of groups that I know and while the “with enough eyes all bugs are shallow” theory does generally stand up, it doesn’t stop it being frustrating. I’m generally against requiring registration for things that are supposed to be public and I wish there was a better solution, I’ve been thinking more about a “web of trust”.
Flock
Hailed by many as the first browser for “Web 2.0” (really just a buzz word for hype itself), I tried the preview of Flock today. I have to say I’m not really sure what they’re doing that’s innovative here. I think the key thing is that they’ve recognised the potential of grouping together web applications, but realistically they’re not doing anything that you couldn’t already do with Firefox extensions and plugins – it’s just they’ve packaged it as a product. The only advantage I can see is tighting up the integration between web services slightly.
To me the whole point of web services as opposed to packages is that features are added without the user upgrading and you connect to them, you don’t install them. Is providing a software package to access web services really the way to go? Surely a better approach would be a web service to access web services. Hint, hint.
Google seem to be pushing the idea of a desktop application to access web services too with taking some unusually forward steps to promote their Google Toolbar. There’s also the Google Desktop and Google Earth, but from reading a recent interview with an employee, the latter is probably just to fill in the gap until they can figure out how to implement that monster in a web interface.