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I have just written a very small Akismet plugin for Elgg.

When enabled and configured, this plugin will scan newly submitted comments of the ‘generic_comment’ annotation class.

While spam comments are rarer on Elgg due to the fact that most sites don’t allow anonymous comments, this could be useful for people who are getting spam comments from people who have signed up.

This plugin comes into its own when you allow anonymous comments, such as on a site I recently built for a client.

Extending this plugin to scan other content should be fairly straight forward for even a novice coder, but if I have time I’ll provide an interface to do so.

Anyway, go get it here, or check out the project page on google code!

Image “Spam! [don’t buy]” by David Trattnig

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On Tuesday 12 a magnitude 7 earthquake struck Haiti causing near total destruction and widespread loss of life.

Estimates of the death toll vary from 30,000-100,000 casualties, with most news agencies picking the figure of 50,000 casualties on the first day.

To put this figure into some kind of context, that’s:

This figure is certain to rise as many have been left without shelter, food, water or basic healthcare.

Aid charities and NGOs from around the world are mobilising, and I encourage you to help if you can.

Here are just a few:

  1. The British Red Cross
  2. Oxfam
  3. Medecins Sans Frontieres

Image from the BBC world service.

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So, I was reflecting on my last post about the Libdems by having a little nose around the internet to remind myself of what they have out there policy wise.

The thing that really irritates me about the Liberal democrats is that when you dig you discover that their policies are actually pretty reasonable. You have their standard policies, but you also have things like the Freedom Bill (which I have just re-read and my only complaint is that it doesn’t go far enough) and the new Take back power campaign.

Unfortunately it seems to be that they drop the ball when it comes to pushing this message out to people who aren’t necessarily actually looking for it – i.e. those who really need to know.

It also seems to be somewhat uncoordinated – lots of disparate messages with no coherent strategy or label making it obvious that it is the Liberal democrats who are responsible.

There is a marketing truism which goes something like you have to see a message through several different mediums for it to stick. The Obama campaign shows what you can do if you try – high exposure using free or near free media which turned their message into a coherent brand which connected with people on an emotional level.

The Libdems do some things reasonably well. Their web site is comprehensive and they’re using twitter (albeit primarily as a press release mechanism), they have an image gallery (which is hard to find and has no mention of copyright).  Unfortunately they seem to fail when getting the basics right – for example I attempted to find a web button for the take back power campaign, and when I eventually found a link for the page it returned a 404.

It seems as though all the pieces are there, but it hasn’t been put together into a coherent and easily accessible message.

What is more, they really need to be pushing their message our in print and on TV. Going out and talking people… in other words, campaigning. The internet isn’t all that there is.

With only a few months left until the election we have precious little time to change this country’s direction. So assuming that the Libdems are the true to their word (and even if they are fibbing about half of it, they certainly seem to be better than the alternatives), what can we do to help them?