Tag: blogs

In the comments area on a recent post by David Davies on unwanted blog comments was a note by Bill Brandon describing a more common form of spam, email spam, generated by harvesting email address from blogs. Anyone who has been publishing a blog for some time and is also publishing their email address is probably subjected to this.

But what it reminded me of was a message I received about a month ago by someone in the field of elearning simulations that was for me an example of spam that wasn’t spam, or at least that I didn’t treat as such. This person made mention of the fact that I published a blog, and then went on to introduce me to their new book on elearning simulations.

Was it spam (or ‘unsolicited bulk email’ to use its more useful/less colourful name)? It was unsolicited and it was email. Was it ‘bulk’? Well, the author may have hand-culled my email address and typed up the message to me. I don’t know. I kind of doubt it. I expect it may have come out of one of the ed tech OPML files floating around, or someone’s web-based blogroll. But the point is, I couldn’t really tell for sure. The tone was such that it appeared somewhat personal, and it was very on topic. If the author hadn’t actually read the manifesto, he was at least very much on the cluetrain. 

Did I buy the book? Well no (not because I wasn’t interested, but because it’s about 49th on the list of things I can’t afford right now). Did it work as a email  marketing exercise?: I’m not a converted buyer, so not by that measure, but I kept the email in my inbox for a few weeks(regular spam lasts 2 nanoseconds in there), I was interested enough to research the author a bit more, and I’m posting to my blog about it (though you’ll have to puzzle out the specifics yourself, as I won’t shill for a book I haven’t read 😉

I don’t mind unsolicited messages; I just mind unsolicited messages that treat me as just another email address. – SWL

You knew it was coming and unfortunately now it seems like it’s here – spammers using both the comments and (as Teledyne points out, potentially far more damaging) trackback facilities to leave their messages and links to their sites.

I have a few reactions to this. Obviously I’m not happy about it. But I don’t think it’s going to bring down blogs (as it basically brought down Usenet, at least for me) as the spammers don’t have a way, as far as I can tell, to interfere with the main channel for communications in blogs – my choice of subscribing to your RSS feed and the content you choose to put in your RSS feed.

What I do think it will problematize, and this may not be a bad thing, is the use of comments and trackbacks to augment the ‘conversational’ aspect of blogs. It’s not that I don’t support this aspect of blogs – I absolutely do. But with the ‘comments’ feature at least, blogging broke from its own original model, the one in which one’s comments were made by posting (or re-posting as the case may be) to one’s own site and pointing to what one was commenting on. Before the ‘comments’ facility, a ‘conversational space’ in blogspace happened (and still can and does some time) through the nexus RSS feeds – if x number of folks all shared subscriptions to each other’s feeds, then you could get what looked like a conversation, albeit an oblique one,  at times it not even being entirely clear you were being talked to or listened to. This is definitely not the most ‘efficient’ or ‘direct’ model of conversation ever invented, but against efficiency it had other advantages, one being the inability to hijack or pollute the ‘newsgroup’, as the ‘group’ in this case never existed in any one space, but only as a set of feeds, any of which could be excluded by any individual, thereby changing the set and the space. 

Trackback is a bit more complicated – in theory it looked like it preserved the integrity of the blog model as one’s postings are made to one’s own site and all it’s doing is creating a linkage between the one being referred to and that posting (and there’s maybe the rub – maybe blogging means you don’t create anything on ‘my’ site). But Teledyne is absolutely right – the potential for automated misuse is far greater here. Again, it won’t necessarily effect my actual RSS feed content, and so I don’t think it will bring down for me what I think of as the blogs I read. But I can’t see what is preventing the automated harvesting and spamming of trackback addresses other than relative (compared to email) obscurity and success rates that are likely to be even lower than other nefarious spam methods.

Maybe we need to think of this as ‘Comment Spam’ instead of ‘Blog Spam’ – blog spam would be if Stephen Downes started posted Viagra messages, or Brian Lamb tried to sell me something to extend my … well you get the picture. But do you think I’d keep subscribing if that were the case? – SWL 

– via [Channel ‘social_software’]