SnapperTalk

Those of you writing blogs should beware the ever-rising flood of comment-spam. I used to get it on this blog - around 10-20 a day - but the last few months it’s been quiet. Then yesterday (Christmas, surely no coincidence) I got hit by over 1000 comment spams in a 24 hour period. With spam levels now running at around 80% of all email traffic, botnets of comprised computers rentable to spammers for as little as $50 per week for a few thousand machines, and a complete lack of will or ability by governments to get tough on the spammers & tackle the problem… it can only get worse next year.

For Wordpress users I highly recommend the free plug-in Spam Karma 2 which managed to stop every single one of them automatically.

As the year starts to draw to a close, news organizations have started posting their annual Pictures of the Year features. The decisions are often controversial - most act to remind the viewer of the sheer range of quality reportage that is produced each year, but there’s always some curious choices as well.

If you know of any other features please leave a comment and I’ll add them to the list…

Time Magazine: The Best Photos of the Year 2006
Reuters: Pictures of the Year 2006 (follow link)
New York Times: The Year in Pictures 2006
MSNBC: Year in Pictures 2006

Update: Rob Galbraith has a very comprehensive list of such features, from mostly US-centric publications, available here