A big welcome to the folks from ipodder.org. Since my last two posts traffic here has increased significantly.

Tonight I'm testing out a new text-to-speech voice here. Its even better than the one I've used for the last two posts. Quality is just fantastic. The last two posts were really a pain to put together and were cobbled together so that is why they sound a bit disjointed. That is mostly due to the way I put them together versus the actual text-to-speech conversion. Maybe one day I'll explain how I put them together. This one was done a little bit differently and obviously uses a different voice.

Let me know what you think in the comments here. For those of you listening to this the blog is located at http://tim.blog.kosmo.com

I've never been one to carry around music and listen much. Of course I've owned a walkman and discman but they never got much use.

With the forces of iPodder, PodCasting and now the new U2 iPod how can one resist!!

This is a bit of an experimental blog post. Since everyone is PodCasting these days and to follow somewhat in Ross Radar's steps, and likely others, I'm basically just going to take this blog entry and create a text to speech recording and enclose it here so the iPodder aggregators can pick it. That way folks have two ways of getting my blog postings. The old fashion web based text way and the PodCast way.

We'll see how this progresses. For now I won't add this feed to the iPodder directory unless I keep this going.

Wow, for someone who's business is largely based on Radio and Manila (as far as I know) this is saying a lot of Bloglines:

Even now that I'm back I keep going to Bloglines, it's a quite cool service.

I made the switch to Bloglines from the Radio aggregator about a year ago.

Over at SimpleFilter we've been under a massive spam attack for the past day or so. In a way I'm happy that we have the spammers thinking they are getting ahead of the game but really all it managed to do was take some of the stuff that Brent and I had on the backburner to implement sometime soon and move it up the priority scale.

So, some of the new items we've implemented over the past day have allowed the servers to run much more efficiently than before.

Instead of adding more and more servers to handle the load it looks like we can probably cut back on our plans to expand the number of servers in the farm!!

Thanks spammers, bring it on, we appreciate the opportunity to make SimpleFilter even better than it already is sooner than we had planned.

This news is a bit old because I haven't been following the spam industry as close as I normally do lately.

Anyway, it seems Mail Cruncher's internation team has taken 3 years to come up with what looks very similar to techniques already in use for some time to fight spam. To base their whole offering on this seems dangerous to me.

I'm getting tired of saying it but SimpleFilter has been using something very similar for a very long time. And of course it is only a very small piece of everything we use in the fight against spam.

The press release is here along with a quote:

Spammers tend to hide and move; legitimate business senders tend to be stable and clearly identifiable. This common-sense observation was the basis for work done by an international team over the past three years. Led by Ms. Lorenzen, the team's work culminated in the creation of a business trust rating database for email called the Outbound Index.

I'm not sure when it was but sometime within the last month or so Yahoo changed the format of their news alerts. I have been using them amoung a number of other methods for watching for various keywords in the news and around the web.

Unfortunately Yahoo seemed to not only change the format but also whatever algorithm is used to pump out the alerts. The format is a lot better but all I get is the same stuff blasted out to me for weeks at a time. So, the alerts have basically become completely useless.

I've just turned them off.

Thanks Yahoo for keeping up with the times.

It bothers me when I read entries like this one from Doc Searls about spam problems. There are solutions out there that work including SimpleFilter.

Spam has not been an issue in my life for quiet some time thanks to SimpleFilter so its tough when I hear people still having issues out there but doing nothing about it.

The offer is out there for folks like Doc and Dave Winer (who have complained from time to time that he is getting buried by spam) to give SimpleFilter a try. The POP3 version has always had a free trial but I'll extend a free trial of the SMTP version to those looking to give it a try as well.

Just contact us over at SimpleFilter.

Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of SimpleFilter.

Announcing Version 1.2 of the still unofficial KosmoBlog.