Over the Christmas and New Year period, I've been pretty quiet, one of the reasons has been a small battle with weblog spam. I was at my wife's parents having a lovely time for much of the Christmas period and occasionally checking email on their adsl line, much of it was weblog spam. Even on Christmas and Boxing day, this depressed me, but as everything on here has been in premod for a month or so, it was fine, 6000 of them in the end...
Then I got thinking about how sad and empty some peoples' lifes are that the best thing they can think of doing was to send thousands of weblog spam on the day when most people are celebrating with friends and family. I'm assuming a few things here, most spam orignates from the USA and they celebrate Christmas there, I know countless thousands do not. The spam continued right through, day in day out, not a break for the disaster in the Indian Ocean. Donate to Disaster Emergency Committee in the UK or Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors without Borders worldwide (donations to MSF). MSF were first on the scene in Sri Lanka, as they are in many countries, Lucy and I donated to them.
That people are hunkered down over their machines trying to use others' good will, time and server space to make a buck is a sad state of affairs. Potentially the frequency of disasters like the Tsunami and other earthquakes, like Bam or the crisis in Darfur will slowly turn people away from this empty activity and on to something that cares more about the wider world, some small hope I know.
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