I’ll be attending MobileCampSF2 on June 14th. I’m not on the list yet, just set things up however. So, if you’ve been wanting to see, well, me… head on over to the site and sign up to attend (it’s free).

I’ll be giving a presentation on Social Networking for Handset Manufacturers. And yes, I’ll be introducing something new.

My half-hiatus from the site over the past couple of months, certainly hasn’t been a vacation. And, it also has meant that PhoneNews.com hasn’t met the high quality standards that I’ve come to define the site.

But, I do want to thank the team here for keeping things going. I wouldn’t have been able to do this without them.

Still, I’m happy to announce that in half a month, I’ll be running PhoneNews.com, and working on it more than ever before. That means you’re going to see a lot from PhoneNews.com this summer, and in the coming months. So, enjoy the news, and stay tuned…

Since migrating to WordPress in January, Akismet has blocked over 100,000 spam comments… as of today.

Total time that it took to achieve this? Four months and 19 days.

And yes, we’re paying members of Akismet… there’s no way that they would block that volume of spam for free.

It’s worth noting that the volume of spam didn’t really change from Joomla to WordPress, the difference here is that WordPress actually blocks the crud. Joomla extensions couldn’t.

We’ve made a few improvements to the mobile version of PhoneNews.com. Most notably, we’ve added a modified version of our navigation bar to the mobile page.

This means you can now jump type in PhoneNews.com, and have one-click (or touch) access to the Forums, and even our Blog.

So, once again, just type in PhoneNews.com into your mobile browser. Enjoy.

Some argue that a small minority of phone users are interested in hacking. And, they’re right.

However, to say that phone hacking is not popular is something we now have empirical data against. See, our Phone Encyclopedia is the world’s leader in hosting firmware flash files for download. This gives us a lot of statistical data, like which phones are the most popular (this month it’s the HTC Mogul on Sprint and Motorola Z6TV on Verizon).

It also gives us bandwidth data. We’re easily clearing over 200 GB in firmware downloads alone for the past couple of months. We anticipate by the end of the year to be pushing bandwidth, just for firmware, in the terabytes a month.

So, enjoy the firmware, we’re happy to offer it. We know you’re out there, and we wanted you to know… you’re definitely not alone in flashing your phone.

A small glitch (embarrasingly small glitch) stopped the flow of email to me partially for the past few days. If you sent me an email, and got an email bounced message… I have your email (you don’t need to re-send it).

Please bear with me if it takes a day or two to respond, I’ve got three days of backlog plus all the new email to go through.

After a (very, very long) hiatus, PhoneNews.com Video is making a comeback. This time, we have all new equipment that allows us to cut, prep, and upload video in under five minutes.

That’s hot.

So, expect to see a lot of video on PhoneNews.com. This time around, streaming in 720p High Definition (in H.264), 480p Extended Definition (in MPEG-4), iPhone Version, and 3GPP2 mobile streams.

We’ve updated the PhoneNews.com Forums to IP.Board version 2.3.5. This fixes several core software issues with the forums, and makes various minor performance improvements.

We’ve also set up a known issues thread, which also doubles as a bug reporting tool for the forums. If you see a bug, post it there and we’ll get to the bottom of it.

Further improvements to the forum (mainly, SEO) will be rolled out next month, alongside a theme update.

It seems that the WordPress spam bots are alive and well. Our servers are being hammered by thousands of spam requests right now. Akismet, combined with our server’s hardware firewall, are repelling most of the attack. Still, we’re having to pull up pages of spam that pass through the net.

Fear not however, even if you see some spam, it’s not a sign that easy commenting is going away. We’ll be deploying some new schemes over the next couple of months that actually improve the comment experience.

And yes, that includes reply notifications if someone posts a reply to your comment.

For a couple of days, at least. The server team, in fixing one issue, accidentially vaporised our ad server. Unfortunately, the issue was with server backups. So, we now have our backups back online… sans the ad server.

I don’t have time to fix it. So enjoy ad-free PhoneNews.com for the next couple of days…

Update: Okay, it’s really dead. Sigh. I’ll have to rebuild from scratch. This time, we’ll be going with Google Ad Manager rather than OpenX. OpenX is nice, until it breaks. And apparently, it breaks at the drop of a log file (literally).

Update 2: A single character difference between the backup and lastest version of our code was the cause of the problem. Fixed. Google Ad Manager is nice, but fixing OpenX was better. The main problem with Ad Manager is that it’s new, and takes a super-corporate DoubleClick server, and tries to shoehorn it into simple, single-site ad management.

In short, this experience showed us that OpenX is the best solution now, but Google Ad Manager has the promise of improving…