TeledyN - Let no fellow nofollow - Comments

Did I tell you, or did I tell

mrG — Fri, 04 Feb 2005 00:22:20 -0500

Did I tell you, or did I tell you: The Register interviews a 'link spammer' who states the obvious ...

When Sam spams tons of blogs and sites with links to his sites - which are affiliates of bigger PPC sites - ... click through to his site, and from there to the parent site, which pays Sam for each person landing there. The PPC sites can see revenues of Â£100,000 to Â£200,000 per month, says Sam. He gets a slice of that - and he wants it to stay that way.

... what about the moral question, that you're using other peoples' bandwidth and blog space and abusing it by putting your commercial message there? "The question of morals is one for the individual. While it's legal, it will continue. It could be argued that a website owner is actually inviting content to their site when they allow comments."

Oh good luck with that one!

mrG — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 14:57:55 -0500

Oh good luck with that one! We can't get them to sign up to anything because, for the first and most basic thing, they will never hear you ask. They are not listening. I can wave a bill in the air all I like, but if the intended recipient is already three thousand miles away, what good does it do?

Unless, of course, you mean we all should pay to send all email, in which case I also strongly suspect you use Microsoft Windows and love it (no particular reason, it's just a funny feeling I get) or maybe you work on Black Penny. Without getting graphic or rude, let's just say the process problems with such a scheme boggle the imagination.

It's worth a note too that for-fee messages were tried before email, and they didn't work. Ok, now, let's gedenken-experiment a bit and just for fun, let's postulate the improbable on the grounds that its a monopoly world afterall: even if you did manage to foist the Black Pennies up all our inboxes, maybe you missed it, so I'll repeat it ...

Spam is fantastically profitable

All you'd do is exclude those who cannot afford the messaging system because they cannot justify the ROI, leaving connected only those whom you sought to exclude in the first place.

the only way to stop spam is

StopSpam — Mon, 31 Jan 2005 13:29:29 -0500

the only way to stop spam is to make them pay for sending the email, just like the US Post Office.

It's a guilty pleasure I know

mrG — Wed, 26 Jan 2005 20:38:24 -0500

It's a guilty pleasure I know, but I love to gloat, I really do, it's one of my few vices, so cut me some slack, ok?

You see, it's like this: first she calls us all thieves for using her 'free' software and subsequently slaps us all with a $400 user-fee ransom note if we ever want to see any of her bugs get fixed (maybe), and now, well, now the gracious little bumble B is calling us all 'spammers' ...

but not in so many words, of course. A slick slip of coordinated A-lister media fungicide that should bring a round of applause from Andy-O as it slaps the bloggers back to their proper place, which is, A-O will tell you, way below Real Journalists. Say wha?

Hebig explains:

If we unselectively apply the tag to links to sites of comment and trackback authors as proposed, Google and other key search engines will see the blogosphere as much less connected and rank it considerably lower. Six Apart is proud to announce having done just that: all visitor-submitted content on TypePad sites gets tagged automatically, read: gets considered potential spam. If someone posts a comment on my blog, giving him Google credits is what I actually want. Just as I did with TypeKey, I sometimes begin to wonder what's really on a company's agenda.

Not so much something rotten on the agenda, I'd say, as perhaps wondering what's on their directorial board, of which I'd say maybe something like, "the same amount of technical acumen, engineering forethought and meticulous consideration that lead to the comment spam problem in the first place?"

But I won't, because one guilty pleasure is enough for one day.

Let no fellow nofollow

mrG — Fri, 21 Jan 2005 16:46:59 -0500

Ben Hammersley has some excellent points on why the bru-ha-ha over Google's nofollow is at best wishful thinking. You see, the key thing isn't to be dazzlingly technically adept in this tit for tat; the key thing is for blogware developers (and politico policy makers) to start thinking like a spammer:

... everyone involved will be forced to try all the harder to get their links out there. The blogosphere will be hit all the harder because of the need to maximise the gains. As there's no more effort in hitting 6 million blogs as there is in hitting 1 million, this really won't bother the spammers one bit.
[ via Let no fellow nofollow, lest we all lie fallow ]

Which is, we might remember, exactly what we're seeing in the email spam circles. The perpetrators don't care if the post works or not, they don't even have the time to take the bother to sift through their newly acquired CDROM of Every Email Address and Web Comment Box on the Planet for $9.99 and see which are even still valid -- they are not about to do this any more than the FAX spammer who still, two years after I last plugged in a fax machine, calls us daily at 9am sharp trying to 'post' something with no return phone number. It's our Old Faithful wake-up call.