Hurray! No more Blogspam.
With our change to the new server (well done Torsten and the Creative Weblogging team) we have a few funky blogging features too.
One of these is if you’d like to leave a comment here (and please, please do!) you have to authenticate it by entering a number you’ll see on screen. It’s a pretty simple solution really to a problem that’s been plaguing us bloggers for a while now – Blogspam (he spits).
Blogspam is just the latest attempt at despicable marketing from the same stables as Spam, Spyware (don’t get me started) and their bastard second cousin, pop ups. In fact, the whole family aren’t too far related from banner advertising itself, which is the totally uncreative attempt of the advertising industry to apply old media values to a new media environment.
Marketing, these days, isn’t about holding people down and forcing them to be exposed to product advertising, no matter how hard they try to escape or explain that they hate you, your product and anyway, why would they, as a single man want to know about tampons?
Marketing, these days, is about engaging the consumer (in fact, “consumer” itself if so old media too. How about “customer” or even “user”. “Partner”? Anyone come up with something better which gives the person buying the product or service some respect they deserve as the judge and jury as to whether your company survives?). Anyway, yes, back to engaging. Engaging the user in intelligent or amusing dialogue that will stimulate them to find out more about you. And hopefully try your wonderful products and services. And hopefully go on to tell their friends all about you too, so you can engage in intelligent and respectful dialogue with them too.
End of that little rant.
Blogspam is practiced by sick (if clever) little shit-for-brains tossers. They post gibberish comments in bona fide blogs, along with their company’s URL. These comments have to be removed by hand by the blogger, who in the vast majority of cases are writing to share with the world. Not money (hah!), but love.
Blogspammers ironically aren’t aiming their gibberish comments at you, gentle reader. But at the search engines. The idea is that some search engines operate by giving sites higher rankings, if they’re linked to many sites. This gives them the appearance of being more popular than they actually are.
Bloggers are pretty good at deleting these things, so I’m not sure how well it actually works for them. And I’m certainly not going to humour any of these companies by naming them here. But it has forced several high profile bloggers to disable comments altogether.
And since blogging, like marketing, relies on dialogue and feedback, this is a BAD thing.
What we, the people, need is a central site that names and shames the shitty, lazy underclass of marketers and their companies. A list of spammers, spyware junkies and blogspam scum. We, the people, can then avoid their products and services and pass the info to our friends. This could be a nice lesson in word of mouth marketing to these parasitical morons.
There, I feel better now.
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