Recently I watched a WordCamp Dallas presentation entitled 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog. One of the thing I liked was the remark that you don’t need to be focused sharply on one domain to have a successful blog. While my blog is first and foremost for venting and my no means do I have a "five year plan" to  for it, it is nice to hear other people are also applying the more "all over the map" style.

However I wanted to talk about an other point that the speaker (John Pozadzides) made during the presentation: not to preemptively hand-moderate comments, but to let automated systems approve/reject comments and go in later and remove any remaining offending posts. As you know this is not the way I do it (one of the reasons being that I don’t host my own blog thus I can’t really install/configure arbitrary plugins for moderation, the other being that I’m a bit paranoid), and although I vowed not to censor posts for other reasons than them being spam, today I had a very "on the fence" experience:

I got a comment on my recent post about alternative configurations as a way to prevent malware pushing a "system optimizer" type of product (the comment is not published). First I looked at the site they pushed and poked around thinking that this may be one of those fake anti-malware products and I can reject the comment in clear conscience. However I didn’t find any proof for that. Finally I rejected it on the basis that it didn’t have any substantial contribution to the discussion (it basically was a one liner saying something along the lines "if you use product X you won’t have this problem"), but it was an interesting dilemma still.