I guess this is the obligatory post that occurs early in the lifespan of any successful blog where I complain about the amount of blog spam I am receiving. It is always a bit disheartening when your community receives more spam than actual comments. Most of it now seems to be trackback based spam. When I disabled anonymous comments, most of the comment spam went away. I have now changed the settings of the trackback modules to reject one-way trackbacks... hopefully that will eliminate most of the trackback spam.

A tragic story is hitting the Internet about Wei Wenhua, a 41 year old blogger who was killed by Chinese Government officials for attempting to film villagers protesting the dumping of waste near their homes with his cell phone. Due to censorship, the only outlet the Chinese have to discuss this injustice is internet chat rooms.

Tonight I've installed the trackback module on startplane. I think trackbacks have the potential to be an incredibly powerful tool for uniting people across the web. Unfortunately, I think they've fallen by the wayside for two main reasons. The first is the spam issue. By moderating and using spam filters I think this issue can be overcome. I would hope most bloggers who have stopped using linkbacks because of spam would reconsider now that the technology has improved.

Welcome to Startplane. I've had the idea for startplane for quite some time. It's gone through numerous iterations in the past, but they always fizzled out for one reason or another. I've always been intrigued by the inherent power of social networking sites and "web 2.0" sites. However like many out there I have always felt a bit let down, as if these sites were somehow not quite living up to their potential. New sites are built (and old ones are quitely deleted or sold-off) in an endless attempt to build critical mass and sell their user's "sweat equity" to the highest bidder.