Alas, my question is not talking about substantive attention — no I’m talking about comment spam bot activities. For some reason there are a couple of postings that appear to attract more than their fair share of comment spam, and the leading culprit by far is my posting from 2006 about Right Media’s funding event (pre- the acquisition). Odd. Anyway, I’ll be going to their party tomorrow night to reconnect with a few people including my fatigued former colleague Greg Yardley. Greg - we’ll be helping change your thoughts on ad targeting forever, just give us a chance!

The people running a newsletter about direct marketing should really know better. That was what I thought when I recently received an email from editor@digitalmoses.com (DM Confidential is a newsletter I subscribe to, where Jay Weintraub is a frequent and very interesting/valuable contributor) entitled “[email-name] please contribute to my reputation on RepVine”. This is what the email said verbatim:

Dear [email-name],

DM Confidential is using RepVine, a free service to manage and display his online reputation. He believes that you would make a good person to supply him with an online reference that will add to his overall reputation.

Your participation is important as your thoughts will help DM Confidential with a wide variety of activities, from getting a job, meeting that special someone, to buying and selling online.

Please click here to contribute to Editor’s reputation. http://www.repvine.com/register/?regid=a6f3ffa3a7988b7a6b97b745cb29ff8b®name=[email-name]

You will be asked to register in order to contribute as we want people to own their comments. Additionally, by registering with RepVine you make it possible so that Editor can contribute to your reputation as well.

On behalf of Editor and RepVine,

Thank you!

RepVine- Online reference and reputation management. Underwriting the attention economy.

Yikes. It obviously looks like RepVine is some copycat type of Rapleaf-esque “say nice things about someone else” type of service but a newsletter proprietor has basically spammed his list asking readers to contribute to their reputation (and this service has a pretty unpolished, not-even-beta feel to it). Of course once the about/who/why section of the site is somewhat uninformative until I get to the privacy policy, which indicates that Repvine is operating under the auspices of Digital Moses LLC, the same organization that puts out the DM Confidential newsletter. So, as I understand it now, this company whose newsletter I’ve subscribed to has decided to spam me in order to establish positive comments about same newsletter and also get signups for this new website they have established? This seems pretty ridiculous.

I replied to the editor and received emails from Hagai Yardeny indicating that it is a recommendation service, and that ‘although the message is geared towards individuals’ that it is intended for businesses as well. He also made no mention of the connection and/or that it was an initiative of Digital Moses. It may well be for businesses as well as individuals, but I find this abuse of their email list to be completely unacceptable and obviously lacking in professional judgement. I’m not sure I’ll even bother to use their own reputation system to skewer them since it involves creating an account there - but this is a very poor way to promote a service you’ve created and also evidences what is perhaps the endemic, ongoing and ultimately destructive short-term focus among participants in the direct marketing and lead generation space.

It’s been a little while since I cleared out Trackback spam. Frankly, the ratio of spam to actual trackbacks is so high that I always debate whether it’s worthwhile at all, and I have not had a lot of time recently to investigate alternate solutions.

I was just thinking of the spam email forecasts I’d built at Jupiter 6-7 years ago, and was curious if I’d been at all in the ballpark, probably guessing that I was way conservative vs. whas has actually happened. So in the spirit of “market research”, also because these comment and trackback spams tend to move in waves, I’ve decided to share with the community at large the details on some of these. The file includes title, time/date and IP and covers 2/28 till 4/19/06.

In slightly less than 2 months, my lowly PR=4 site has received:
- 2008 trackback spams (about 40 per day)
- 1985 unique IP addresses
- bunk beds, ringtones, xm satellite radio, phentermine, student credit cards etc.
- plenty of poker

I leave the advanced analysis to others: but it is a fascinating cross section of “payout” categories and products online. (real) comments appreciated! Spam pings for analystblog.com

A few people at my company (I think everyone listed as employees on the public website) received a “guess” email asking how many employees we had, from someone at the email address scott@lead411.com — we didn’t reply for the most part but it didn’t bounce, and then a few days later I started getting random emails from vendors. One from a timeshare/condo seller in Floria, another from a sales tool provider, and now, more recently two (yes 2) emails from a sales rep at XO Communications. The first two seem like the mom-and-pop scramble to get leads type of businesses, but you’d think that a real company like XO (presumably) would know better than to use someone who is using such unscrupulous tactics.

They probably don’t know, (although, maybe they do?). [BTW: I am sure it is from Lead411's nefarious spamming because that form of my email address works but is not one that I have ever used, plus my account is still fairly untainted and clean at this point] Is this an acceptable tactic of getting leads — find people’s names online, guess their email address and then when you find out that it doesn’t bounce, sell that as a lead? You could probably also append all kinds of interesting data based on my bio on the website — you’ve got my name, title, previous employers perhaps…

One of our officers had previously contacted Lead411 and told them not to use any email addresses of people at our company — but it is clear that they already sold/provided them to at least 4 different companies (by my recent experiences). I’m currently trying to get more information from the XO rep, hopefully he will be helpful. I’ll post the results of my investigation here. Another company whose practices I detest is Jigsaw… but I don’t think they’re the ones at fault here.

Reading the Economist’s Technology Quarterly, including a discussion of eBay-Skype and the future of telecoms (good article, pay/registered users) thought again about the inevitability of these two things:

According to Rich Tehrani, the founder of Internet Telephony, a magazine devoted to the subject, Skype and services like it are leading inexorably to a future in which all voice communication, near or far, will be free…. As when checking e-mail on, say, Hotmail, the only thing needed is a broadband-internet connection, but it can be anywhere in the world. Sooner or later, people will discard their unwieldy phone numbers altogether and use names, just as they do with their e-mail addresses, predicts Mr Zennstrom.

Just as we have seen with email and with blogs (I just deleted the weekend’s yield of about 60 comment spams and over 50 trackback spams) anything that is free and can be automatically pinged/prodded/scraped or digitally interacted with, will become subject to get-rich-quick or annoy-for-fun or whatever spam.

This will be a serious issue for VOIP and internet telecom, and I have still not seen a lot of discussion about it in the press. Too early perhaps, but the prospects of boiler-room type scams launched at us from everywhere from Estonia to East London (not to single anyone out of course) is frightening. Spam and spam-viruses have continued to get more sophisticated. This past week I saw two new interesting ones, an IM virus (”hey check out the page I created” with a link to an EXE file that I obviously didn’t load) coming to me from a former coworker, and then the increasingly interesting ones where they link two different email addresses. I received an email with an attachment from a 2-years ago former work email address (ostensibly) to my current personal email address. They both start with the same stem and so someone obviously wrote a program to link up the user identities as a way to “increase the response rate” for their virus/spam.

If phonecalls are free (and digitally connected to computers enabling a 13-year old from whereever to easily access), and user identities and passwords continue to be as weak as they are today for things like email, we’re going to be in for a whale of a time phishing, skimming and scamming our way along!

IPOs have been fairly sparse in the last few years compared to the rush of 1999-2000 when scarcely a day didn’t go by that there was another three or four S-1’s to check out just within the Internet sector. I still recall with fondness when we saw the first of several companies to file to go public with ZERO revenue (Que Pasa.com). At any rate, I still subscribe to the Hoovers IPO Update, and they had a special July 4th issue. I leave it to you to decide if this is a best or a worst email marketing practice. I might have changed the subject line if I were them. Notice the careful choice of words

From: Hoover’s Online [mailto:contact@communication.hoovers.com]
Sent: Mon 7/4/2005 7:46 AM
To: Rob Leathern
Subject: IPO Update: Week of July 4, 2005

*******************************************************************

VOIP adoption continues to increase at a rapid pace, and we’re about to start hearing about VOIP phishing. It’s still pretty far from the mainstream, but trade and industry people are starting to talk about it now. Low-cost international calls, fake caller-IDs and diminishing returns to online phishing (which despite lots of discussion as far back as 2000-2001 as I recall writing about it) hasn’t really taken off until the last two years. Look for VOIP risk management and consumer telephone re-education to be big issues for vendors and the FTC alike in the next 18 months.

I found a very interesting thread on slashdot, a posting by a programmer who apparently has to do morally-questionable programming to put food on the table…. some of these apps are no doubt the ones spidering sites, gathering email addresses and slipping through the best efforts of the spamblockers. Interesting thought that “bad guys” quite often have to get others to help them do the bad things they do - in this case write the software to get the job done. There is a very big downside to worldwide instantaneous access to programming-human capital, and it makes you wonder just how many engineers are in the same moral bind.