It’s almost taking on the aspects of a game and I might chase it as such if I didn’t have a life and thus more things of greater importance to do than make life miserable for the spammers. It is a new sort of spam I had not known of until began to take on this on line presence in earnest. We all know about email spam. Soliciting messages from people you don’t know and would rather not know. Seedy little pimple faced misfits in a basement of a rundown flat somewhere in Eastern Europe, doing their best to make enough money for their next coke fix by sending a million messages to email mailboxes around the world hoping to get a few illiterates to bite.
If you have a blog or a web site message board you encounter a couple more varieties of spammer. In another post I commented on the Comment Spammer. This is the guy who adds a nonsensical comment to your message board or blog for the sole purpose of adding his commercial web site URL to your site as another back link which he thinks will help his search engine popularity rating. As promised before, sorry, I know I still have not, I will talk more about that variety of spam later.
Obviously if you own and operate a blog you want readers. I suppose someone might simply want to read his own writing but I suspect most of us do this because we have something to say and feel that what we say is important enough – wow! I know that sounded awfully narcissists, sorry – to want others to read what we have written. So, we look for ways to promote our sites to gain the largest audience we can. Why not. That’s the purpose of the whole blogging thing. Spread the word far and wide. There are tools to help publicize blogs. I won’t name any specifics right now but let’s just think of them as networks of sorts where bloggers can add their blogs and others within the network can see them and if so interested, “cross connect”.
Any of you familiar with the popular social networking sites know that in order to gain “popularity” within the network you must have “friends”. Now truly that is a different take on the traditional interpretation of the term. At least for those of us who have a higher respect for the definition of the word. On the social networking sites, it simply means someone’s name who is added to your list of contacts and you hope that your name is on their list of contacts as well. Though some of them might indeed be people you really have seen and talked to in the real world, most are known to you (and you to them) by a screename.
I joined this particular blog network for one reason. It has a subgroup of Christian and Conservative blog members and that is a group I do want to cross connect with. We actually have something in common and we do gain by broadening our own exposure within the Christian/Conservative blogging community. Our goal is to spread the message of truth to the world at large and by working together we add our voices together to accomplish that goal.
Now I have begun to receive the invites from other bloggers who want to be my friend. Well that is touching in a sense but I’m a little taken aback when someone who has claimed that they now call me their friend doesn’t even know my name. This morning in my email I receive a notice from the network, “rose4u has added you to their friends. To see rose4u‘s profile, follow the link below” I will say as a tempting incentive, the picture rose4u has added to her profile is well……. Ok, I’d better not go there. Truth though? Do I really think the person who created that profile and posted that picture really is or looks even close to that sexy lass? Probably the pimple faced boy in the dingy flat in Eastern Europe in real life.
The follow up message from the network says, “rose4u has posted a new message to your shoutbox” (that’s what this network calls its message-to-you box on your own profile page) and the message is “Hello friend! I visited your website and added you as a friend. Good job to by you.” Yep, sounds more like the Eastern European to me. “Good job by you”? English is not your first language, is it. Since rose4u‘s several blogs she’s (I’m still dreaming it’s the girl in the picture) promoting have nothing to do with Christian topics or politically Conservative topics, or even topics of any sort for that matter, I don’t think we’ll bother to reciprocate by adding her as a friend. They are strictly affiliate ad pages with no personal content at all. No wonder she needs so many friends.
I will have a little fun at her expense though. She left a message on my shoutbox. I’ll respond. “Dear beautiful rose4u“, ok, I really didn’t begin it that way. “Oh come on now. You never visited my site. You have no idea who I am or what my site is all about. You don’t even know my name since you addressed your message “Hello friend.” No, I will not visit your site nor patronize your ads. I added another one. “But I will add, I like what your picture says you look like. If that is really you which is subject to question.” Now let’s see what new visitors to her profile think of that message.
And then we have the invite from batthirazabatthi. Did I get that correct? Yes, a lot like rose4u, a close cropped full face picture of a very pretty girl. Wonder if she’s also related to pimple face. This message is strictly boilerplate. Word for word the same as that from several others. “I visited your site. It is very nice. I had clicked on your ads. I hope you do the same.” Then comes the URL of her site and “please keep in touch. development together. thanks a lot!” No, I didn’t mistype the missing capitalization on the last two sentence fragments. I posted a similar reply to her message which will be read by her profile viewers.
Here’s the plan. Create a website or blog filled with ad content and then sign up for Google Adsense ads to include on your pages. Send a bunch of messages to other blog owners saying you have visited their sites and clicked on their Ads by Google ad links and invite the blog owner to come to your site and return the favor by clicking on your Adsense ads. Google, are you aware of this scam to rob your paying Adsense sponsors of their advertising dollars?
One more. samantha20. You guessed it. Picture shows her to be about 20 years old and, I’ll move on now……… Same sort of approach. “Hi, visited ur site… great work done….” Sure, you did, Samantha Baby. Samantha Baby has 2,448 friends on her list. Wonder how many of them are drooling 20 year old guys. Well I’ll try not to drool over her picture and I won’t add my name to her list either.
Dan W. Dooley
Dooley’s Treasure Chest
