Tag Archive for 'Spam'

Is it wrong to love spambots?

Published on October 10, 2009 in apathy. 1 Comment Tags: , , , .

I am a reluctant blogger at best. A better way to frame my engagement with blogging is to say that I love the idea and hate the practice. As I write nothing of any consequence and, more frequently, nothing at all, the only comments I receive are from spambots.

Hotlinked Robot (sorry owner)

Hotlinked Robot (sorry owner)

Some people may dislike spambots and delete their messages. I, on the other hand, immediately approve of spam messages for several reasons:

  1. It looks as if someone is reading and responding to my blog
  2. They are often complimentary, feeding into my ego for two seconds or so
  3. They remind me I have a blog when I get an e-mail that “someone has responded to my blog”
  4. They are generated to be somewhat related to the posting, unlike most blog comments that are comprised of  thinly veiled self-references.

I should probably delete them as they are only creating a distinctive link for Google or any search provider to rank them more highly when someone searches for a lucrative word such as “mesothelioma” that just happened to show up in a posting to which they are now linked. That being said, if spambots didn’t post, who would?

Some asshole would like to be added as one of your friends!

Published on October 14, 2007 in ideas. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Goddamned myspace.

I signed up yesterday for a lovely Lijit widget in order to consolidate my social networking presence into one easy-to-use spot. I realize now that signing in to MySpace was a bad idea…

I loathe MySpace for its shitty interface, poor functionality and being aesthetically displeasing to the max, but the worst part of MySpace is the damned friend requests that deluge my e-mail inbox five minutes after I sign in…

I see the mail that says that someone wants to be a friend, with me! I am assuming that it is someone awesome like this random guy waving on Flickr that saw something I wrote and loves me, or is a long lost friend that wants to make a connection.

Instead it is a porn site… it could be some other type of website, but 99% of the time it is shitty pay porn.

Unfortunately, sometimes you have to go to MySpace (perhaps to find a musical act or something artsy), and having an account on the site seems like it is easy enough and that it can’t hurt. This is wrong. It does hurt–too much fucking spam.

I have heard about people trying to coin the term Bacn for useless e-mails that aren’t spam and aren’t worth your time. I think that these friend requests are the worst type of Bacn, because they are inoccuous-looking and unfilterable (one day someone might add you as a friend on MySpace for the real) but definitely spam. Actually, looking at this NPR story, this is called FakinBacn, which is a fun damned neologism BTW…