Smart comment spam is still spam
Now this is a smart comment spam:
I am not sure that I can completely understand your comments. Would you be so kind as to expand on your reasoning a little more before I comment.
I’m not going to link to the site where this originates (or, more accurately, where it points) because I don’t want to encourage or support spam in any way. But you can see who’s doing this here:
It’s smart, of course, because you have to think for a moment before being sure that it’s actually spam. But it’s still spam, as you can see when you go to the site being promoted, and realize it’s a shell site with nothing there but Google AdWords.
Annoying!
Link exchanges are so 1997
UPDATE Feb 21: pls note Trisha’s gracious reply below …
I can’t believe believe people are still sending out link exchange requests:
Hello,
Recently I contacted you regarding a link exchange request. I was hoping that you’ve had the time to review this request and consider my proposal. We are developing a reciprocal link area on our website and would be happy to trade text links with your website. You links will be on the PsPrint.com website, although we are not entirely sure where at this point in the project.
Please let me know if you are interested in discussing this further. You can contact me at trisha@psprint.com or 510.224.2106. If you are not interested in a link exchange, please let me know and I will discontinue contacting you regarding this matter. Thank you for your time.
Trisha Fawver
Marketing Manager
PsPrint.com
510.224.2106
Create. Print. Mail. Faster.
This is now the third email I’ve gotten from Trisha, which is starting to approach spammishness. Note the veiled threat in this statement:
If you are not interested in a link exchange, please let me know and I will discontinue contacting you regarding this matter.
In other words, I’ll continue to receive unsolicited emails until I say yes or until I waste my time composing an email saying no.
Hate facebook hate facebook hate facebook
I am so over Facebook.
Essentially, I’ve put my Facebook profile on autopilot using applications that suck in all my data from around the web. But I hardly ever go there myself.
Why?
Well, first of all, my employer blocks Facebook. While I certainly wouldn’t spend a long time there anyways during the work day, it’s annoying to get little email notifications during the day about something a friend did on Facebook, and then having to think about that later if I want to check it out.
Secondly, and much more importantly, while the application infrastructure of Facebook is amazing, it’s also fingernails-on-blackboard perky-happy-chirpy-people-on-Monday-mornings annoying.
Let me say that again: ANNOYING.
Everytime anyone does anything, Facebook feels like it needs to notify me. So-and-so is playing Scrabulous, someone else took a picture of a cup of coffee, someone else is super-poking me, and his dog is joining some stupid corporate fan club because they happen to like Tim Hortons coffee.
I love to know when someone has posted a new blog entry.
But I don’t need the minutiae of their every footstep on Facebook. There’s a massive annoyance factor in being sent some kind of message that actually isn’t a message. It’s not a real message … not a note, or email, or IM, or actual communication … but a piece of digital flotsam, tossed off randomly from some interaction with a Facebook application, sent easily and spammishly and automatably to tens or hundreds of “friends.”
But that’s not the worst part.
The worst part is that half the time, when you get this piece of digital flotsam, if you actually care to see the picture of the cup of coffee, you have to install the application that the “friend” used when adding it to Facebook. And then you have to sell your soul to the devil and allow the application to know the most intimate details of your online life.
Enough!
The social utility doesn’t have any.
Verisign is hounding me …
Verisign is driving me nuts emailing me and phoning me. Just to make it perfectly clear:
- I don’t want your PDF white papers on internet security.
- I don’t want your SSL certificates.
- I don’t want your emails.
- I especially don’t want your phone calls from “sales executives.”
Hrm … now that’s off my chest I feel marginally better. Until the next call starting off with “Hello, this is $salesguy calling from Verisign. How are you?”Worse than I was before you called.
Aksimet down?
Aksimet must have gone down last night … I woke up to 40 emails from my blog.
(I set my blog to hold comments in moderation from people who do not have have prior approved comments … and email me when it does that.)
Seems to be back up this morning. Blogging without Akismet is almost impossible - at least if you want to allow comments.
Most ridiculous opt-out page ever
This has got to be the most ridiculous opt-out page in the history of permission marketing:
First name, last name, job role, department, industry, company name, address, city, state/province, zip/postal code, country, phone, fax, email, and comments.
Unbelievable. Email address and UNSUBSCRIBE is the max expected.
Better yet is a link in the email that includes your email address and automatically takes you to a page that processes the unsubscription and lets you know.
Is Akismet down?
I’m getting a wack-load of comment spam today. Hopefully none is slipping through to the site because i moderate, but this is annoying.
Usually the Akismet service deletes almost all comment spam before I even see it, but today it appears to be taking a long coffee break.
The Akismet website says nothing about being down, and the spam zeitgeist is still up and claiming that 14,326,525 spams have been viciously murdered so far today … but I’m getting way more spam.
Any clues?
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Sparkplug 9 is John Koetsier's blog on life, the universe, and everything,
but mostly the stuff you see big in the tags to the left.
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