Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
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Brent and Eva have been playing with Firefox personas, which are easy-to-use themes that let you personalize the look of your browser. They’ve creating some excellent Kobayashi Online logowear for Firefox, and have been pleasantly surprised to see one of their seven personas has had more than 60 active users!
Eva is hopeful that Apple’s iOS 5 will, indeed, make the iPad magic device after seeing a charming video from Simon Pierro. While it can’t change the weather, the iPad update let Simon take the sun out of the sky, and into his pocket. Facetime has been updated so that in addition to being able to share a conversation, you can share a glass of milk. While the video looks to be the product Simon’s slight of hand, we hope that iOS 5, which Apple gave a sneak peak of earlier this month, shows at least some of the sparkle of this video.
Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt recently spoke in Cannes about how the mobile phone will replace the browser as the world’s next “primary development artifact”. Roberto is wondering how this will affect Web design and online writing as we know it. His guess is that websites will have less copy, more images, but fewer icons and menu items. We’ll be glued to our phones to find out.
At an Elvis Costello concert, Daveed was surprised by the lack of restrictions on recordings and photos. Many years ago this would’ve been unheard of, given that content providers have put the kibosh on anything that may infringe on their copyrighted materials.
In the event that the top content providers and US Internet service providers actually come to an agreement on piracy crackdown system, which seems to be in the works, Canada will surely be under pressure to follow suit.
Skeptical that piracy can be curbed through strong-arm tactics, Daveed wonders how long will it be before the cultural industries learn to live with current technology and use it for profit, rather than fight it – a fight they are bound to lose. For the time being, Elvis Costello isn’t afraid of fan recordings.
While he’s still among the site’s 687 million users, 
Are you stopping visitors from commenting?
Blog comments are something that you should typically encourage because they give readers a chance to participate in the conversation. Comments give readers the opportunity to relate their experiences, offer their point of view, and provide related information. This interaction within the blog can help to expand the original blog post, sometimes giving it a life of its own.
If one of your blog’s goals is to encourage commenting, you should try and make the commenting process as simple as possible.
In this post, we will describe some ways to encourage WordPress comments, while dealing with the inevitable, unwanted comments posted by finding ways to moderate them.
A CAPTCHA, seen at the bottom of this comment form, could stop website visitors from posting a comment.
Avoid CAPTCHAs – A CAPTCHA is an automatically generated test where a user is typically asked to read distorted text and type the letters they see. Because an automated spam program cannot easily decode this distorted text, a CAPTCHA helps ensure that comments are submitted by a human.
The downside is that humans can find CAPTCHAs annoying. The squiggly lines of text can be extremely hard to read, making it frustrating for the commenter, who may have to try several times to guess at the characters. Many give up.
Eliminate unnecessary forms – Posting a comment should not involve filling out a long form; it should be as little work as possible.
We recommend not having any unnecessary forms to fill out such as entering your email twice, or having a pull-down menu of your “preferred title”. Unless it’s absolutely necessary, those commenting should only be required to enter their display name, email address, and comment.
Consider using OpenID – There are tools available that make it easier to sign up or sign in to comment.
The OpenID plugin for WordPress, for instance, makes commenting easier for those who already have OpenID accounts. OpenID gives users control of their online representation across multiple websites, so that their account and username are the same for each and every website. From a usability perspective, giving visitors the option of signing in using OpenID means they doesn’t have to manually enter an email address or handle, and their account is consistent across many sites.
Tools to eliminate spam – By making it easy to comment, it could be easier for spammers to post comments. Eliminating spam is crucial because comment spam not only can it reduce the overall quality of the conversations, but it can also bring down your site’s search engine page rank.
One tool that helps manage spam is Akismet, which helps filter out comment and track-back spam by running each comment through hundreds of tests to determine if it’s spam. This means you don’t have to waste time sorting through and deleting spam from your blog.
One of the great things about Akismet is that there are plugins for many popular platforms including WordPress and Joomla.
There is a trade-off between making a blog easy to comment on, and mediating spam. Tools like Akismet make moderating comments easier, but you must also spend some effort manually finding and deleting spam comments. We think, however, that the extra time and effort this is worth it, given the value that legitimate comments can provide to your blog.
Feel free to share any questions or tips about how to encourage blog comments. If you need help simplifying your blog’s commenting system for your visitors, or dealing with comment spam, please let us know!