Two stories caught my eye this week. On tuesday, and to the horror of most of its users, Microsoft announced that Windows 7 will ship in six different versions. Most of which have pesky little limitations.

A day earlier, Linus Torvalds said in an interview with Distrowatch that having ‘hundreds’ of different Linux distributions is ‘absolutely required’. So where most Windows users would have greatly preferred a single version of ‘their’ OS, Linux’s founding father sees no problem with having hundreds. I have to admit that I tend to agree with the Windows community on this one.
More Six Windows versions bad? Try hundreds!

I guess anyone who runs a WordPress blog will have noticed the recent flood of Russian comment spam. Like a lot of English spam, the comments appear to be hand-written, and can almost pass as regular comments. The problem therefore is how to figure out whether or not a message is spam.

Something similar has happened on Gmail, where my spam box is usually full of Chinese characters. Gmail’s spam filter is incredibly accurate, so I usually simply delete everything in my spam folder. With blog comments however, things are a little more tricky.
More What to do with foreign language spam?

Dutch (occasionally) funnyman Youp van ‘t Hek once referred to a book as a ‘pile of faxes’, back when faxes were the latest thing. I guess that joke needs to be updated to a pile of printed emails, but it does show the generation gap between printed and digital media.

Covering some of the middle ground by trying to combine the best features of printed books and new technology, 2007 saw the release of Kindle, the first serious e-book reader. I read today that it’s still doing very well in terms of sales, even outpacing the iPod. I find myself unable to figure out why.
More Amazon’s Kindle doing well… but why?

I promised to donate to five of my favorite WordPress plugins a little while ago, and offered to let you help decide how the money should be divided. Unfortunately, that post didn’t yield enough comments to truly determine which of my picks you liked best. That’s why I decided to simply split the money five ways.

I made the payments yesterday, and I must say that felt good. I’ve been using some of these plugins for ages, and it seemed only fair I made a little donation in return. Please see the original post for the nominated plugins. Now if only I’d known Matt was going to introduce a ‘Thank a plugin developer day‘ so I could have timed this to match that. I’m pretty sure Joost, Arne, Krischan, Mitcho and Michael aren’t going to mind though .

One of the few websites that I visit daily has recently been redesigned. At first I thought it simply looked worse, but I decided to give the new designs a chance. Now, a couple of weeks on I still don’t like it, and I’ve also figured out why. Webwereld is in Dutch by the way, so don’t bother trying to read the text in the screenshots.
More On Webwereld’s recent redesign

I don’t like ‘re-blogging’. I try and write original stuff and not point to other people’s posts. This video however is essential if you’re serious about SEO and WordPress, and you haven’t seen it already you really should. My fellow countryman Joost de Valk talks about SEO and shares some great tips. The video is after the break.
More Joost de Valk on WordPress SEO