One thing I’ve learned in my 10 months of blogging, or as I like to say “writing in public,” is just how much any site, even a fairly quiet one like mine, attracts spam comments. Ads for medical treatments, sexual aids, long nonsensical posts where I suspect someone is being paid by the word, and many offers of help – to generate more traffic, solve technical problems, or improve the content of my site. You don’t see these comments because an internal process lets me “cut them off at the pass,” so to speak.
Every now and then, they make me laugh. My favorite so far is a comment posted to the page where I give some background on myself, “About me.”
I’m pretty sure of my source, though she still surprises me.
But the “conclusion”?
Well…I try not to pretend it won’t ever come, but ultimately it remains one of those big mysteries.
One of the joys of parenthood is when your children prove to be smarter than you. My son, Rebar, turned me on to the very interesting writer Hakim Bey.
Bey, in his book Sacred Drift, discusses the concept of “fortuitous mistranslation”
which I have always liked- and it certainly applies to comments on the internet.
Its kind of a genetic mutation, and evolution, of ideas, unintentionally.