Apparently Web 2.0 is now a trademark - at least that's what CMP, acting on behalf of, amongst others, O'Reilly, would like us to believe. There's a good run down of the issues here, but the heart of the matter is that another company is running a conference with Web 2.0 in the title and CMP don't like it. Web 2.0 is a phrase that is used just about everywhere to refer to a variety of technologies and websites, but I hardly think it is trademark material.

There I go praising spam system Akismet, and then this story appears on the Computerworld site. It highlights one of the critical issues with nearly all spam systems - that you must train them properly, and go through the folder or quarantine mechanism that you use to filter out and identify the false positives.

Certainly, from the details we know in this story, it seems that the quarantine folder wasn't checked regularly enough to identify completely valid emails.

This is an extreme example of when things can go wrong, but simpler and less drastic issues can arise, like missing an important email, or an email lying in the quarantine folder for years before it is finally passed and released.

There I go praising spam system Akismet, and then this story appears on the ComputerWorld site.

It highlights one of the critical issues with nearly all spam systems - that you must train them properly, and go through the folder or quarantine mechanism that you use to filter out and identify the false positives. Certainly, from the details we know in this story, it seems that the quarantine folder wasn't checked regularly enough to identify completely valid emails.

This is an extreme example of when things can go wrong, but simpler and less drastic issues can arise, like missing an important email, or an email lying in the quarantine folder for years before it is finally passed and released.

Regular readers will know that I'm a fan of WordPress, and in fact I use it on all my blogs.

With WordPress 2.0 came the Akismet plug-in, designed to catch and prevent spam from making it to your comments and ergo your blog posts. It is exceedingly effective - on just one of my sites, I trap about 300-400 comments a day, and over 6,500 over the course of the last three months.

Akismet is a network enabled verification/checking system that shares information about marked spam with a central server. As well as improving the quality of the spam filter, it also means that they can get spam statistics for all of the Akismet enabled sites that use the service.

Regular readers will know that I'm a fan of WordPress, and in fact I use it on all my blogs.

With WordPress 2.0 came the Akismet plug-in, designed to catch and prevent spam from making it to your comments and ergo your blog posts. It is exceedingly effective - on just one of my sites, I trap about 300-400 comments a day, and over 6,500 over the course of the last three months.

Akismet is a network enabled verification/checking system that shares information about marked spam with a central server. As well as improving the quality of the spam filter, it also means that they can get spam statistics for all of the Akismet enabled sites that use the service.

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of when I started blogging here at ComputerWorld.

So this week, I'm going to be doing a combination of looking back at some of my past posts, composing some thoughts on how the computer market has changed in that year, and looking forward to what might be happening over the next.

To document what's changing this week otherwise though is much simpler - the T2000 is going back. I really don't want to send it back, because of all the machines I have had on test it is the one I have most enjoyed simply 'playing' with.

I don't mean playing in terms of games, but I do mean in terms of letting my imagination, thoughts and applications run wild on the box. I've tried all sorts of things, from database benchmarks and full applications, right down to simple processing tasks and even the distributed.net client.

Tomorrow is the one year anniversary of when I started blogging here at ComputerWorld.

So this week, I'm going to be doing a combination of looking back at some of my past posts, composing some thoughts on how the computer market has changed in that year, and looking forward to what might be happening over the next.

To document what's changing this week otherwise though is much simpler - the T2000 is going back. I really don't want to send it back, because of all the machines I have had on test it is the one I have most enjoyed simply 'playing' with.

I don't mean playing in terms of games, but I do mean in terms of letting my imagination, thoughts and applications run wild on the box. I've tried all sorts of things, from database benchmarks and full applications, right down to simple processing tasks and even the distributed.net client.

Unless you missed it earlier this week, Vista has been put back another quarter.

This is starting to be real problem, not just for companies who want to move on from Windows XP, but also for those who waited for the next revision before upgrading. I know, even now, of companies that still use Windows 98 and Windows 2000 because they chose not o upgrade to Windows XP but wait.

Of a larger concern, particularly to Microsoft, are those people at home who are waiting for Vista so they can play Halo 2.

This comes in the same week that Firefox announce they are dropping features from 2.0.