Am I the only one who's now getting spam blog comments that seem to be attempting a form of contextual camouflage? I'm used to the stuff which appears to be random prose, but below I quote from one which is posing as a treatise on/review of a book by Iain Sinclair, whilst trying to sell the usual crap.
There must be some bit of code that visits a neighborhood of blogs, chops them up, and intersperses the result with links before posting it back out again. Or some vast semantically-vectorised database that can take the content of a blog and make a rudimentary guess as to what subjects and types of writing might linger there, evading detection...
It's actually becoming uncanny now, it's quite easy to mistake genuine human idiots' comments for clever spam, and vice versa ;) Sometimes I think I recognise bits in the spamprose - thinking, haven't I read that before? did I write it?
It must be a fun job continually developing the code to produce this stuff, but given the underlying dumbness of the marketing strategy it's sort of hard to admire them...Now if they were thinking more subtly, it might make sense to take the topical context into account in the advertiser's links themselves, like linking to www.cheappsychogeographicalbooksonline.com instead of all this credit card/penisenlargement crap. No doubt that'll be next.
which in Sinclair's conjuror's mind range from accept credit card Bram Stoker's Dracula (Dracula's English pied à terre green card lottery is located close to the present-day motorway) to cruise Ballardian ideas about consumerist landscapes and hotel the "transcendental boredom" they invoke (Ballard caribbean cruise himself appears in the film) to conspiracy theories las vegas hotel and the omnipresence of camera surveillance on usa visa
UPDATE!!
Of course, I thought....Google on these little phrases, and I'll find out the source of the camouflage text: well, first of all I just got ten or so other blogs afflicted with the same spam...but then I found this on I Feel Love. Now how do you feel about your work being dismembered and used for indiscriminate marketing purposes, Angus?! Still, it proves my theory; the code they're using obviously picks out linked blogs and uses text from one to post to the others; using the structure of the blog network 'against' itself, in fact. Fascinating stuff...
Good Lord! That really is creepy, although I would probably have felt more violated if I'd recognised the above as my own work! Sinclair and Ballard aren't my usual territory. I don't know what's worse, people receiving unsolicited spam or people receiving my unsolicited thoughts on London Orbital...
Posted by: Angus at May 10, 2004 03:04 AMYou didn't recognise it? That suggests the possibility that you may have been spammed by your own work without realising it. That'd be _either_ a really effective mode of advertising, because you'd feel a mysteriously strong affinity with the content of the ad; or totally disastrous, because no-one aspires to be like they actually are...
Posted by: undercurrent at May 10, 2004 11:23 AM
Comments