{"id":263,"date":"2003-09-01T11:24:30","date_gmt":"2003-09-01T19:24:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.edtechpost.ca\/wordpress\/2003\/09\/01\/when-is-spam-not-spam-when-its-in-context\/"},"modified":"2003-09-01T11:24:30","modified_gmt":"2003-09-01T19:24:30","slug":"when-is-spam-not-spam-when-its-in-context","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wordpress\/2003\/09\/01\/when-is-spam-not-spam-when-its-in-context\/","title":{"rendered":"When is spam not spam? When it’s in context"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the comments area on a recent post by David Davies on unwanted blog comments<\/a> was a note by Bill Brandon<\/a> 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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>, he was at least very much on the cluetrain. <\/p>\n

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 \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

I don’t mind unsolicited messages; I just mind unsolicited messages that treat me as just another email address. – SWL<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “When is spam not spam? When it’s in context”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blogs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scottleslie.ca\/edtechpost\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}