Looking for a Spammer with an Ounce of Creativity...

Unlike most bloggers, I don't really mind when other bloggers (and even businesses) try to piggyback on my posts to gain some traffic for their own sites or draw attention to their services. That's just good marketing strategy, and I'm all about a collaborative environment where potential customers know what their options are and make informed choices. I don't want my law school admissions consulting business to be the only one a prospective student finds online--I want it to be the one they choose after they read the information on my site or talk with me on the telephone. And I certainly don't want my posts on topics I consider to be socially significant to be the only opinion someone sees. So post away--comment, disagree, add supporting points and feel free to include your link.

But add something of value.

I have a lot of blogs, but the two that draw the most targeted spam are my relationship blog and my LSAT / law school admissions blog. That makes sense--one is a competitive area and the other is a money-making venture. That being the case, I'd expect the people who drop spam comments on those blogs to be good at it. I'd expect them to be thinking in terms of marketing their sites or their services when they commented.

If they were, and they made intelligent comments, I'd leave their links alone. Even direct competitors are welcome to add valuable insights and information in my space, and when they do, they should take credit for it.

It's when they show themselves up as lazy and incompetent that I get annoyed. If my subject matter is also your subject matter and you have something related of value that you're trying to draw readers back to, shouldn't you have the ability to craft a sentence or two reasonably related to my content? And if you want someone to trust you with their hard-earned dollars in return for a service, shouldn't you show that you have the capacity to perform that service well?

I'm always torn in this situation. This morning, for example, I found a spam comment on my law school admissions blog from an LSAT tutor. As I said, if he'd added anything at all of value to the conversation, I'd have left his link. In fact, I'm only tutoring a very few students at the moment under pretty narrow conditions, so if he'd impressed me I'd have checked out his site to see whether he might warrant adding to my list of referrals.

If he'd just dropped a link, I'd have deleted it and moved on.

But no--he left a "comment". His comment was that he was glad I'd posted this LSAT information because he had been looking for it for a long time.

And then he left his link. As an LSAT tutor.

Can't you just feel the confidence bubbling over?

I deleted the comment, but I had to think twice about it. Part of me wanted to promote that post all over the place and let his prospective market see that either he was too stupid and lazy to formulate an intelligent sentence to post or that he was reliant for his "expertise" on information found on a stranger's blog.

Inside Information About the Dashing Cody Rhodes and His Disfiguring Injury

This is the first post from my new co-blogger (and long-time daughter), Tori.

When I was a little girl my daddy loved the WWE. He would watch it all the time and he had all the video games and the t-shirts, so I loved it too. His favorite was always Undertaker. I know all about Undertaker now of course. I had his poster on my wall as a child; I even have an Undertaker teddy bear on my bed. Then, Undertaker brought another wrestler into my life: his brother Kane. Nowadays Kane is the extremely large, half naked, bald man who teams with the Big Show, but when I was a kid he was the menacing, stringy haired, evil masked brother of Undertaker. I remember staring at my television screen in horror as superstars stole Kane's mask from the locker room. I remember the towel he wore on his head until he got it back. I remember him losing to Triple H and taking his mask off. Then his career went on. He wasn't the prettiest wrestler out there, but he got one of the prettiest divas, then he lost her to my favorite wrestler Edge, crashed their wedding, Edge stole his father and tied him to a wheelchair and so on. Everyone seemed to forget about the mask AND the reason he wore it. Supposedly he had been so badly scarred by a fire set by the Undertaker he couldn't show his face, but then he did.

Eight years go by. Enter Cody Rhodes, son of "The American Dream" Dusty Rhodes, brother of Golddust. He could have gone in any direction with his WWE career he wanted to. He chose to focus on his looks. He became known as "The Dashing Cody Rhodes" and had video segments on Smackdown sharing his beauty tips for being dashing. His titan-tron featured mirrors and his perfect white teeth. Then it happened. He was in a match with Rey Mysterio when Mysterio, who's had surgery on his knee five times, hit Cody Rhodes in the nose with his knee brace. Cody Rhodes then disappeared to have facial reconstructive surgery. The show's outraged announcer Michael Cole went on and on about how terrible it was and the shame Rey Mysterio should feel (Is it just me or does Michael seem to have a bit of a crush on Cody?) until Cody returned. Suddenly his titan-tron was a mess of newspaper articles about his accident. He started being referred to as "The Formerly Dashing Cody Rhodes". The beauty segments stopped. Then he came out to the ring for the first time since the accident and I saw what was coming; he was wearing a large black cloth over his head and pushing cameras away. "Don't look at me!" he screamed at them. He climbed in the ring and let the cloth fall, revealing a mask.

Now this wasn't just any mask. It wasn't a red and black mask like Kane's. It wasn't star embroidered like CM Punk's. It was a clear, plastic mask with eye holes and a good inch of space around his nose. Everyone gasped. He covered his face with one hand while speaking into a microphone about how ugly he looked. Michael Cole jumped in with him talking about how "disfigured" he was. I laughed. I thought out loud, as I usually do, "That mask is clear." and my mother looked up from her computer. "Yeah?" she said sounding a little confused. I explained to her all about the accident and the knee brace he had taken to the face. I told her how he had called himself dashing and now he called himself disfigured.

My mother had never seen Cody Rhodes. She is NOT a WWE fan, but I went searching for a picture to show her. She looked at it and then the T.V. and she laughed too. Months passed; Cody's gimmick spread to insulting other people's looks and making them wear plastic bags on their heads. I was watching Smackdown last night when they began talking about him again. "I had a long conversation with Cody's doctor yesterday" one of the announcers was saying. He explained that Cody didn't have to wear his mask anymore unless he was competing, but he still wore it everywhere. "Wouldn't you?" Michael Cole asked. He began his usual routine of comments about Cody's ugliness. They zoomed in on him again, showing his mask. I laughed again, because I know something that no one else in the WWE universe seem to have realized: Cody Rhodes hasn't changed a bit.

Week after week since he first came back from his surgery I find myself yelling at my T.V. "I CAN SEE YOUR FACE CODY! YOU LOOK JUST LIKE YOU ALWAYS DID! That mask is CLEAR!!" He can't hear me of course, nor can his millions of fans, but I have to wonder: Why they haven't noticed for themselves that the "Formerly Dashing" Cody Rhodes is just the Dashing Cody Rhodes with a see through mask on?

Headlines

Complaining about the media is nothing new--for decades we've heard that reporters or publications or the news media as a whole were biased in one direction or another, that they slanted information, withheld details that might have harmed the case they wanted to make and generally acted more as advocates than reporters.

Then, in the past 10 years or so, something even more sinister started to unfold. The news media gradually ceased to be "the news media" at all. Once a supported branch of a major news station, "news" was quietly folded in under the general income-generating umbrella of a television station or publication. While we might have argued for years that the media had an agenda, now it was clear--the mission of a news program was no longer to inform, but to earn its keep at the station. In days gone by, a news program might have earned its keep simply by lending credibility to the station, by providing a source of reliable information for viewers who might then stick around to watch the income-generating programming, but no more. Today, a news show has to pull its own advertising dollars.

That means, in short, that providing accurate, useful information is no longer the job. Getting people to turn on the news program, regardless of how misleading your headlines and teasers have to be to get them there, is job one.

Of course, people have a threshold for drama; after eagerly tuning in to see a story time after time and discovering that it wasn't as compelling as they'd been led to believe, the sense of urgency wears off. The same is true when the target audience is being asked to click through to a website rather than tune in to a news show. And so the media has to up the game. The result is teasers and headlines that have little relationship to the actual news being conveyed. And that's more than just dishonest: it's dangerous and destructive.

News producers know it can be dangerous and take steps to protect themselves from liability, but those steps don't reach so far as to actually protect those who happened to catch the headlines or teasers.

Recently, for instance, it was widely reported in network teasers that a "popular" blood pressure medication might cause cancer. The actual report referred to a narrow category of blood pressure medications, stated that the increase in rates of cancer as compared to the control group had been very small and no causal relationship had yet been identified, and emphasized that people shouldn't stop taking their medication.

Sometimes, the misipressions formed by those sound bites aren't actually dangerous, but simply inflammatory. This morning, for example, an MSN news station ran the headline "Mum aborts baby to end morning sickness". Naturally, the story was reposted in many forums (probably often by people who hadn't actually clicked through and read the story) and outrage abounded...but in fact the woman in question had aborted to put an end to Hyperemesis Gravidarum, a serious side effect suffered by some pregnant women which involves near-constant vomiting, extreme weight loss, strain on the heart and dangerous dehydration.

Of course, it's still open to debate whether or not abortion was the right answer, but that, at least, is the right question. The woman interviewed for the article appears to be telling her story because she was no offered counseling or other options for dealing with the condition and wants to help get the word out to others facing the same difficult situation. The content of the article itself makes that clear. But the overwhelming impact of her choosing to speak out is that her face is now associated in the minds of hundreds of thousands--perhaps millions--of people as the "mum" who killed her baby because she didn't like feeling queasy in the morning.

We complain that journalists "aren't doing their jobs", but in fact we simply misunderstand what a journalists job today looks like. The person who wrote this particular misleading headline created a page that's already drawn thousands of inbound links and been reposted in forums, across Facebook, Tweeted and otherwise disseminated to people who might otherwise not have visited that site. He or she has helped the station's search rankings and spiked traffic in a way that raises advertising revenues. That journalist, in short, has done a GREAT job of what he or she was hired to do. It just happens that "what he was hired to do" was not "report the news".

She Looks Like a "Susie" to Me...

I just learned that you can hire an expert to help you name your baby: The Science Behind Being a Baby Namer

No, this doesn't rise to the level of many of the topics I cover here, but I do think it's a sign of the deteriorating times. Are we that detached from our own children and how we see them that we need outsiders to come up with the trendiest name for them? (and the pros say it IS trendy we're looking for, not unique) Do people who have the talent and creativity to compile all that data and discern trends really have nothing more beneficial to do with their time? Is this really the kind of thing we, as a society, want to put a monetary value on?

Yes, it's a trivial complaint...but the trivial adds up. Anyone remember Brave New World?

So It Begins

This American-born truck driver was handcuffed and detained after weigh-station officials decided that his commercial driver's license and social security number weren't adequate proof of citizenship. Only after his wife left work, picked up his birth certificate and delivered it to officials was he released to go on about doing his job. Good thing he had someone at home to call, and that he knew exactly where his paperwork was. If you don't, maybe you'd better get a copy to start carrying with you now.

Too Stupid to Spam?

Comment spam is a given in the blogging world, but sometimes it's more blatant than others, and sometimes it's just so flat-out stupid that it's more entertaining than annoying.

About a month ago, a friend and I started a new dating and relationship blog. Of course, online dating is an area ripe for spam, and so we started getting hit almost immediately--so soon that I wasn't sure how they were finding us. One of the places we were getting consistent spam from was called University Love Connection, and it always said the same thing: "This is a great blog, we are going to add it to out free online dating internet and college information blog www.universityloveconnection.com/blog so our visitors can read your news, as you are a reputable source. Thanks online dating" (With a couple of live links, of course--I've stripped them out here not so much to discourage spam as to discourage stupidity)

I initially thought it was all coming from the same person, but I soon learned otherwise: apparently the Director of Comment Spam for the site sends out instructions. But apparently their hiring criteria are pretty lax, because yesterday we received this comment:

Here is the post to Make on every one : This is a great blog, we are going to add it to out free online dating internet and college information blog www.universityloveconnection.com/blog so our visitors can read your news, as you are a reputable source. Thanks online dating

Cutting and pasting, apparently, is an art too sophisticated for some.

Book Burning for the 21st Century (and beyond)

Book burning--book banning--is generally viewed as a harbinger of evil in our society, past and present. Whether it's an historical account or an imagined future world, most of us shudder at the thought of a society in which information and ideas are torn from our hands, in which the thoughts of the past or the facts of history or daring newborn ideas are concealed from us.

Even in the direst of futuristic visions, books were forcibly removed, destroyed, forbidden. In the real world, we're giving them away.

This thought has been playing in the back of my mind for some time, but it bubbled to the surface this past week when Amazon deleted copies of two George Orwell novels previously purchased by Kindle owners across the United States. Sure, Amazon had a reason for deleting the "books". Sure, Amazon said it would never do it again. But isn't the real issue that they were ABLE?

I've resisted the move toward readers like Kindle for a reason entirely unrelated to the future of our society: I love books. I like the look and feel of them. I like to hold them in my hands. I like the texture of paper and to watch the size of the chunk of pages behind the bookmark diminish as I work my way through a novel. I simply don't WANT to read a digital copy. But there's another, much more significant reason to resist that move--one that unfortunately seems not to have occurred to most of those on board with the "progress" that is a shift toward electronic books.

Imagine that today, some powerful entity decided to do away with the ideas set forth in George Orwell's 1984. Eradicating the novel would be a huge, probably insurmountable job. Physical copies exist in huge numbers, in multiple languages, in countries around the world. And, of course, no one really knows who has all those books...and if we did know, it wouldn't be especially useful information because a book can be easily hidden or handed off. Books are resold, donated, and recycled every day. Some are undoubtedly thrown away; others are destroyed inadvertantly. Even if we knew who had purchased every single copy of the book ever printed--which we don't--that wouldn't mean we knew where they were now, or even how many still existed.

In short, eradicating an existing book in print (particularly a popular one) would be virtually impossible.

Eradicating the Kindle copies of two well-known novels was apparently relatively quick and easy. Today, that's an inconvenience, an outrage to some, a bad move in customer relations terms. But today, Kindle is just beginning to take root. Today, most of us still have the books we treasure safe on our shelves at home, and it would be difficult for someone to make them disappear.

20 or 30 or 40 years from now, when we've all "caught up with the times" and there aren't any of those clunky, old-fashioned paper books lying around, will someone make all of our "books"--all of our history and information and ideas--disappear with the click of whatever has replaced the mouse in that future-world?