As I alluded to previously, I seem to be getting “intelligent spam” on my blog: comments that pass the re-captcha test and seem on-topic, yet upon further inspection clearly constitute link spam: either the author URI or a link in the comment body is spam.
Here is one of the most clear cases, received on January 9 as a comment to my post on the CFTC’s call for proposals to regulate prediction markets:
Date: Fri, 9 Jan 2009 01:28:01 -0800
From: Matt.Herdy
New comment on your post #71 “A historic MayDay: The US
government’s call for help on regulating prediction markets”
Author : Matt.Herdy
Comment:
Thanks for that post. I’ll put a note in the post.
1. It’s nothing new. The CFTC will just formalize the current
status quo.
2. We are prisoner of the CFTC regulations and the US Congress’
distaste of sports “gambling”. As for the profitability of prediction
exchanges in that strict environment, I don’t see how you can deny that
HedgeStreet went bankrupt even though it was well funded. Isn’t that a
hard fact?
3. You’re right, but all “pragmatists” should follow a business
plan and make profits. See point #2. Pragmatists won’t make miracles.
<a href=”http://www.stretch-marks-help.com/”>Removing stretch marks</a>
At first blush, the comments seems to come from a knowledgeable person: they refer to HedgeStreet, an extremely relevant yet mostly unknown company that’s not mentioned anywhere else in the post or other comments.
It turns out the comments seem intelligent because they are. In fact, they’re copied word for word from Chris Masse’s comments on his own blog.
Chris Masse’s page has a link to my page, so it could have been discovered with a “link:” query to a search engine.
Though now I understand what this spammer did, I remain puzzled exactly how they did it and especially why.
- Are these comments being inserted by people, perhaps hired on Mechanical Turk or other underground equivalent? Or are they coming from robots who have either broken re-captcha or the security of my blog? (John suspects a security breach.)
- Is it really worth it economically? All links in blog comments are NOFOLLOW links anyway, and disregarded by search engines for ranking purposes, so what is the point? Are they looking for actual humans to click these links?
In any case, it seems an intriguing development in the spam arms race. Are other bloggers getting “intelligent spam”? Does anyone know how it’s done and why?
Update 2010/07: Oh, the irony. I got a number of intelligent seeming comments on this post about SEO, nofollow, economics of spam, etc. that were… promoting spammy links. I left them for humor value though disabled the links.
The Last Analogs
Last Analogs like me grew up in the dawn of the digital age, yet had plenty of experience with VHS, walkmans, card catalogs, and film before the Internet shifted the revolution into hyperlink drive.
I recently had a Last Analog moment: A holiday card I sent to a friend was returned undelivered.
He had moved and I had sent it to his old address.
It turns out I actually had the correct address filed away in an email folder — he had kindly sent it to me months earlier — and I had even tagged the email as “contact info”. Yet my address book failed to reflect it, mostly because my address book doesn’t read or process email, but rather expects me to do it.
This is an inherently Last Analog problem.
The new address books — the Facebooks and Plaxos of the world — solve the problem gracefully. On Facebook, I don’t keep my own separate copy my friend’s address; instead I keep a pointer to my friend and all his data and let him do the updating. My friend doesn’t need to email me and I don’t have to transcribe anything (or, in the early days, call and write), and repeat the same for all his friends. He updates his own information and everything else happens automatically.1
There are a ton of inherently Last Analog problems, including not knowing how much money you’ve spent in a month, how many calories you’ve burned or eaten, where your car or key or friend is, or where you are. A Last Analog could be living and working near an old college buddy and not even know it.
But perhaps the most unfortunate Last Analog problem is our impaired collective memory. Last Analogs grew up without the benefit of all the little digital trails that people now leave automatically as they go about their lives: the emails, twitters, geo-tagged photos, walls, groups, friendlists, and blogs that form a searchable, hyperlinked diary.2
For Last Analogs to catch up still requires considerable effort: for example, digging out old boxes of print photos and scanning and geo-tagging them by hand. Presumably even this process will become cheaper and easier, but in the meantime the online map view of my post-college European tour is fifteen years in waiting and counting, memories of metadata fading, and the slide show at my 20th high school reunion this spring will be only as complete as busy schedules allow.
Too bad the wayback machine doesn’t go that way back.
I guess its time to get over my First Digital envy and get to work scanning uphill both ways in the snow.