The crew at Bam Creative thought we’d get in early this year, and do our annual silly electronic christmas card thing. 426 business cards, 500 photos and a few hours later, here it is.

Merry Christmas to everyone - let’s hope it’s a safe one, and the year to come is great.

Photo: Close up of my business cards.

So, I got a new toy on Friday, a long awaited Canon EOS 400D. A serious digital SLR, instead of the compact Sony DSC-V1 that has been my trusty friend for the last three years.

A crazy increase from 5.0 megapixels to 10.1 megapixels goes to show where technology has headed over the last three years. Now I just hope that my storage keeps up with my requirements. At 3mb per image in JPG format, the EOS400D can certainly chew up hard drive space, especially when I shoot 509 pictures in the first three days.

It’s about time I stepped out of my comfort zone with my photography, and started learning more about exposure, speeds, ISO, etc.

The pic above shows you what I was shooting on Sunday - the Red Bull Air Race came to Perth, Western Australia for the final stage of the 2006 World Series. An estimated 300,000 turned up on the banks of the Swan River to watch it, and a further 11 million watched it around the globe. An amazing new sport, completely created by a company looking for a sport to sponsor and promote - those marketing propeller heads at Red Bull are onto a winner.

Image: Michael Goulian in 2006 Red Bull Air Race, Perth WA.

Last night at a Port 80 meeting in Perth, a few of us were discussing comment spam, and Nick Cowie made the suggestion I must be more popular than him with more spam comments on my blog.

As much as I would like to be popular, it’s not the attention I am really looking for. Since I installed Akismet around early May, I’ve received 28,586 comments which were spam on this blog. That, coupled with 7,622 spam emails to my main email address in the last week or so makes me start to wonder about the future of blog comments and email.

I agree with Adrian Lynch when he announces that email is dead. It’s been dying a slow death for a number of years now, and it’s not getting any better. Email clients and plug in filters keep improving, and the spammers keep improving their methods to get around it. Blog comment spam plug in developers are looking for further innovations, at the same time that spam software companies spend just as much on getting around them.

The internet was a hive of real activity many years ago, and now the dreaded spammers have just about killed it off. We’re deleting so much spam, and relying on so many filters, that we’re losing real emails in the process, and we’re just trashing any emails which don’t come from people we trust. I turned full moderation on my blog comments a month or so ago, and now when any real person comments, I must check it, approve it and then it gets published. A hassle for the commenter, and a hassle for me.

Newsgroups and many mailing lists have become so flooded, that no one bothers to even read them anymore, and even black hat SEO techniques with Search Engines means we’re spending more time trying to filter out the noise and find the real conversations.

Is there an end in sight? Who knows. Although one recent local court case put a smile on my face.

Image: Screen grabs of blog admin screen and Outlook.