* This is a recreation of a post I published five months ago. It is revised and updated.
Seems like some "writers" here are desperate to have their pearls of wisdom and literary accumen read by as many people as they can possibly entice into doing so. To further that end, they send private messages announcing their latest, and requesting the recipients to visit their blog, read their posts, and comment or rate them.
Such messages are commonly called "blog-whoring", or "blog-pimping". They are clearly spam, in that they are unsolicited emails, sent to a group of addressees, and ask the reader to invest something, in this case, his or her time. Here's how Wikipedia defines it - E-mail spam, is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients.
Back in January, when the OS management announced that members would each have a spam folder, into which they could direct any messages they considered to be spam, I started directing all such messages to that folder. After five weeks, I opened the spam folder and deleted the entire contents. There were 143 messages. 143 spamming, attention-whoring, blog-pimping spam messages in only five weeks!
All this in spite of the fact that I have made it abundantly clear, in my blog and in comments on blog post by others, that I do not welcome these PMs. I know that many of them contain some "opt out" statement, but I have had several spammers react with a "well, if that's how you feel, I'll never read nor comment on your posts again..."
Spam is not merely annoying, it is harmful to the environment. Please read Chicago Guy's And here you thought SPAM was just annoying. There you'll learn that the energy used to deal with SPAM in 2008 alone, was 33 billion kilowatt hours. or the equivalent of the greenhouse gas emissions produced by 3.1 passenger cars.
Are you willing to ignore that fact, as well as to put your fellow OS members to the effort of dealing with your self-serving spam?
Send your announcements to all those who request them. Then they won't be spam, nor blog-whoring, but polite advertising.
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Comments
hee hee
But what's this now -- do I understand there is "spam blackmail" going on? The dastards. Who are the perps of these deeds? Hey, didn't you tell me once "If you don't name him, don't blame him." So, come on, name 'em and shame 'em.
Yippee, this could start another OS brouhaha.
WOOF
Please Read My Post Or I'm Sending A Pack of Angry Jehovah's Witnesses to Your House for the Next Week
.
Dawg - I'm always up for a good OS brouhaha. I even tempted the disapprobation of the vocabulary police by reposting this.
Since my definition which you quote above obviously doesn't apply to you, why would you be offended?
all the blog whoring on OS couldn't make a measurable dent in the environment. using the environment to justify your arrogant condescension is lame.
But I'll not send you another Wayne.
Padraig, what I said to Emma et al. St. Terrry-Thonas appeared on my telly last night (in the form of a rerun of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.) He accepted my plea for intercession.
Which remark do you want clarified?
Every time I visit OS, and that's usually more than once a day, I peruse the "Most Recent" pull-down at the top of the main page. That way I don't need any reminders, any reliance on Favorites, or any other resource to find EVERY post of interest to me.
And send you not
Notice of more
Missives from my fingertips
Or anything else from
This whore
My pride is shallow
Wish it were deep
I only want to make
Something you keep
Tom, I did too click on that link. If the JWs show up, they better be prepared to salute the American flag.
Ablonde. always happy when a comment is expressed in poesy.
I've tried a lot of things on OS since joining, including mass emails, but quickly realized that some of the best posts are "discovered" by blog-hopping, rarely from a PM.
I do occasionally email a group of people about an issue of concern, or to promote someone a new writer I think is worthwhile.
It's very hard to tell someone you'd rather not receive their PMs, for fear they'll take something personally when that's not the intent. I don't like having that onus put on me.
Cap'n - you know I love ya', but I disagree with you on this one. If everyone PM'd me everytime they blogged, it would overwhelm me, and some days that's how it feels. I think the PM should stand for "personal" message, as well as "private" message.
The real problem is that OS doesn't provide a good means to subscribe to a blog. Oh... wait... there's that RSS feed button on every blog here!
Wouldn't it be more productive to address this directly with the individuals who are sending you PMs?
After reading some of the comments here, I perceive that you didn't communicate this clearly for some of the readers. The evidence of that is some are offended or confused by the purpose of your post.
After checking my PM distribution list to ensure you were not on it, I decided to post this comment. I respect the boundaries you draw with respect to your PM inbox.
Please consider to deal with this on individual basis going forward. People won't have to guess if they've offended you. I feel you lose the import of what you're saying by making generalized statements.
Thank you for reading my comment.
I appreciate the e-mails. Even when it's a new person, I don't take offense. It takes less than a minute of my time to check out a post and move on if it doesn't appeal. New writers use e-mail to make connections, and writers who have been here a while use e-mail to sustain their connections with friends.
If these messages are directed into your spam folder, I don't understand why this is even a problem for you. It takes what - 2 keystrokes and 5 seconds to delete all of your spam? Why would you want to assume the worst about people, saying their messages are all inflated ego and desperation? What's wrong with hoping your post gets read anyway? Isn't that the reason for publicly posting your writing in the first place?
I'm baffled why you would want to tar people this way, even going to the lengths of posting this diatribe twice. I'd like to point out that there is a kinder way to look at those messages - and hope people will continue to notify me when they've published work they want to share.
But, you know..I just delete them...asking them to remember to not add me seems like overkill.
....and sometimes I am caught by something lovely. So I would be sad if they went away entirely.
Its really too minor an irritant to hurt people's feelings over...but I suppose I understand your frustration as well.
Love that last picture.
Mr. M. - I do not send ANY mass mailings, much less unsolicited ones, so, yes, I am innocent of this. To me, it's just a matter of basic respect.
I hadn't been on OS in a few weeks and I also had a couple dozen or more of these e-mails. I deleted all and tried to find my favorite writers one post at a time to catch up on what I missed.
But herein lies the rub. I'm rarely on OS repeatedly throughout the day (though that may change now that my job has divorced me). There are people I have listed as "friends" whom I was following a topic and missed the fact that they had made new posts. If many people blog at once, an individual may enjoy at best an extremely brief appearance on the feed - and this is even true in the column for our friends' updates.
So while I generally agree with what you said and certainly appreciate the rationale involved, I also have to admit that there are some posts I was wanting to read which I would have completely missed had their poster not let me know. I've personally never blog-whored - though I probably came close when I PMd one person to let him know that I had written about a subject he had asked me to write about and had dedicated that post to him. He loved the post - and had not seen it for days until I let him know in that PM that I had written it. Yes, we are friends but he had missed that blog, just as I had missed one of his until he wrote me letting me know of its existence. Even among friends, things sometimes fly under the radar.
I'm thinking if you let the offending parties know how you feel, they will probably know not to PM you. I still (usually) try to read these posts when the writer informs me about them. I know I still miss many good things.
Did anybody see any words?