Trevor Cook is campaigning against astroturfing, along with Paul Young. They’ve set up a campaign page.

As is pointed out on the page, Astroturf groups have their Internet equivalent in the form of sock-puppets, one of the lowest forms of life on the Web.

The Risk and Sustainable Management Group blog has been pretty quiet for the last few weeks, as most of us have been travelling, and pressure of work has been intense. But things are livening up again. Some recent posts

Howard on Water

Are institutions failing us?

The energy efficiency debate we have to have.

Read and enjoy!

The 21st of June is the winter solstice and also this blog’s fourth birthday. More than 3000 posts and maybe 50 000 comments (I have more than 40 000 on record and thousands more were lost in the database disasters of 2002 and 2003) make this a pretty huge endeavour. No doubt, much of the content has been ephemeral or worse, but I think there are some substantial contributions. Thanks to everyone who’s helped to make this a success and encouraged me to keep going.

I’ll be marking the occasion by taking a bit of a break. Feel free to talk among yourselves (politely, please!)

Meanwhile, there’s loads of good stuff around the Australian blogosphere. Tim Dunlop and Tim Lambert are reliably readable, and there’s always Tim Blair if you fancy a change of pace.

My econoblogging colleagues, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh have hit the headlines with their study of births delayed to get the government’s baby bonus, but fame doesn’t seem to have swelled their heads. Then there’s the group blogs, Catallaxy, Larvatus Prodeo and Troppo. I’ve had some great interactions with all of them.

I got some interesting links from some recent posts, including this one on my review of Yochai Benkler, which leads to an interesting debate about Wikipedia, and Harry Clarke on whaling.

Finally, if you’re one of the handful of readers who’ve been around from the beginning might remember David Morgan, one of the pioneers of Australian plogging, and one of the first to quit, when he found fatherhood more exciting than typing. He was on the ABC quiz show The Einstein Factor last night and won (he previously made big money on Who Wants to be a Millionaire, I think). Interestingly, his blog is still live, though it hasn’t been updated for years.

Is about free sharing of information, and is rescued from behind their increasingly adamantine paywall.
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Today’s Fin runs the headline “Investors bale as market mood darkens”.

I assumed this was a subeditor’s error, but a check around the internets suggests that “bale out” is common usage in British English, even though the only suggested etymology (from bailing out a boat) clearly requires “bail” (= bucket).

In other news, the Fin is cutting back its free online presence even further, replacing it with AFR Access, described as

a flexible investment research application that combines our news and analysis with a range of renowned information and data sources and adds rich tools and unprecedented search technology.

This is interesting, given that WSJ and (I think) FT seem, if anything, to be opening up a bit. It’s clear though, contrary to Guy Rundle’s suggestion a while back, that charging for content is going to remain a very minor part of the Internet economy.

I’ve always resisted imposing general restrictions on comments. To make life easy for genuine commenters, I’ve dealt with trolls and spammers manually. But, after a period when they’ve been in retreat, the spammers are back in force. So, I’m implementing a moderation scheme. If it works as intended, commenters will have their first comment moderated until I approve it, and will then be automatically approved.

To simplify things, regulars (or those who plan to be regulars) can just comment here, and I’ll approve them en masse.

If this doesn’t work, I’ll probably go to one of those annoying code-deciphering thingies. If readers would prefer annoying code-deciphering thingies, feel free to say so.

If it works well, I’ll be able to reduce the class of words, like pharm*cy that trigger the automoderation software.

Update It looks as if everyone who has a comment in the database is approved, unless they trigger the automoderation tests. And, so far, the spammers are being consigned to moderation, so this may work OK.

I had a database corruption problem a couple of days ago and a side effect was apparently to break the RSS feed (thanks to Paul Knapp for pointing this out). At least in NetNewsWire, resubscribing seems to fix the problem.