The most common attempts to define 'spam email' is either as 'UBE'(Unsolicited Broadcast Email) or 'UCE' (Unsolicited Commercial Email);for example, the spamhaus.org definition here . I tend to think thatthis sort of definition of spam has some problems.

Let's start with a provocative question: is advance fee fraud(so-called '419' email) spam email? (You know this type of spam;the classic version has Mrs. Mariam Abacha,

In the weblogs world, to 'ping' somewhere is to send an automatednotice to an indexing site that your blog has updated. Popularindexing sites include weblogs.com and technorati.com . Major blogging packagesalready do this out of the box, but if you've rolled your own(such as me, with DWiki ) you're on your own.

In a modern blog world with millions of blogs and RSS and Atomsyndication feeds, something like weblogs.com looks more than alittle bit old

In C, a common idiom for initializing multiple variables to the samevalue is serial assignment:

a = b = c = 0;

Python allows for the same thing; just remove the semicolon in theabove and it's valid Python syntax, and it even works. So when I wasstarting Python, I wrote things like that. And then one day I wrotealmost the same thing, in an __init__ function in a class:

self.fooDict = self.barDict = {}

The

Unfortunately, the issue I discussed in ADynamicSitePeril is notjust a theoretical problem. And it's my old friend MSNbot , the MSN Search web crawler,that's responsible.

It's been known for some time that MSNbot is very aggressive withsyndication feeds(for example, see here ). The official explanation is that they want to have a really up to date search index, andto get breaking news they have to poll RSS feeds frequently.

Well, bully for them. However, it's