The porn and Viagra comment spammers seem to have given me a break lately. However, I occasionally see a more sophisticated form of comment spam such as this one left on my post entitled “WSJ — The Art of Outsourcing”:1…

bq.. Outsourcing is most common for companies whose IT needs are well known in advance. IT outsourcing can also mean hiring someone to be your IT department. Such a partner must have people who can work closely with your staff to understand your unique business problems so that you can deliver.

p. Ok, maybe it’s not that sophisticated of a comment, but it’s clearly spam whose aim is to direct traffic to the spammer’s site (in this case, an outsourcing company in India). And sorry, no link love for the spammer.

Zoinger says, hit the delete and buh bye comment spam.

[1(Original Zoinger post on outsourcing)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/06/08/wsj-the-art-of-outsourcing/

Don’t think that blogs are going to be a bigg deal? Well, check out the “digg story”:1 titled “Abusive New York Camera Store Threatens Blogger” dugg by a pretty famous blogger/photographer named “Thomas Hawk”:2.

BTW, 5870 is a GIGANTIC number of Diggs

Still don’t think this is a big deal? Well, here’s a quick traffic rank comparison I did using Alexa of “digg.com vs. Slashdot.org”:3. Ya know, Slashdot’s famous for crushing sites with traffic, exploding servers, enriching Sun/Microsoft/LAMP/Dell with sales, keeping IT departments up all night, etc., etc. — aka the “Slashdot effect”:4.

Don’t know about the spike at the end of the graph, but it’s the magnitude that counts

Somebody in New York is not going to have a happy Christmas, ’cause Santa knows who’s been naughty — and he reads blogs.

Zoinger says, be a part of the conversation… but assume that everyone is listening.

*Update: 2005-12-1*
Wow, when I said that 5000+ diggs is a lot of diggs… well, it’s the MOST dugg story ever… by a lot. Check out the top dugg stories every “here”:5. It’s not going to be a bad Christmas, it’s gonna be NO Christmas.

*Update: 2005-12-1 v2*
Surprise, surprise… Yahoo! actually seems to be reading blogs. Here’s some excerpts from Thomas’ blog “post”:5 on his ordeal with PriceRitePhoto (the offending store).

bq.. One of the things that troubles me the most about this situation is that I found this retailer through Yahoo! shopping and they were perceived to have positive feedback. Is the feedback mechanism for Yahoo! Shopping broken? How could this horrible retailer have a four star rating with 858 ratings? I’m convinced that there is a possibility that many of the “reviews” for this company could be fake. I should though have sorted through the reviews to the worst to see that many others had fallen prey to similar fraud by this company.

p. Further down his post…

bq.. I also received this email today from Joe Lazarus, Director of Marketing for Yahoo! Inc.: “Tom, I wanted to follow up on a comment I added to your post on PriceRitePhoto. I work at Yahoo! Shopping. I passed your issue along to our Customer Care team who will investigate and take the appropriate action per our merchant Guidelines and Terms of Service. I covered some more details in my comment. Please feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions. ~ Joe”

p. And…

bq.. Update #8: Although I have not heard directly back from Yahoo! or their Marketing Director Joe Lazarus. It would appear at least that for the time being, today, PriceRitePhoto is not operating on Yahoo! Shopping. They are still listed as a merchant there and there is a link to their store but when you do a search by their store for products for sale through Yahoo! you get the following message: “We didn’t find any product results for mid:1016578.” I’m not sure if Yahoo! pulled their listings or if PriceRitePhoto did or if that is just part of what happens when Yahoo! investigates a company. I hope that if after investigating Yahoo! concludes that this company is acting unethically that they will in fact delist them altogether. I will update as I hear more on this.

p. I just did quick search in “Yahoo! Shopping”:6, and was unable to find the PriceRitePhoto anywhere in Yahoo! Shopping (I searched on the store name and for them under a Nikon D50 search and Canon EOS D5 search). So good on Yahoo! for responding, but they clearly need to upgrade their rating system.

Oh, just remember if you are ordering anything online, make sure to use a credit card. If you have differences with your retailer which you can’t resolve, contact your credit card company, and put the order in dispute. I have had great luck in the past getting a refund via this route.

And I am sure that PriceRitePhoto is still in business under other names. Remember it’s cheap to have multiple business/domain names, so watch out out there.

[6(Yahoo! Shopping homepage)]http://shopping.yahoo.com

[5(Top dugg stories)]http://digg.com/topstories/thisyear

[4(Wikipedia on the Slashdot effect)]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect

[3(Alexa digg vs. Slashdot)]http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&compare_sites=http://slashdot.org/&y=t&q=&url=www.digg.com

[2(Thomas Hawk homepage)]http://thomashawk.com/

[1(thomashawks dugg stories)]http://www.digg.com/users/thomashawk

Ok, the comment spam is getting a bit more thick, so my short-term solution is to moderate comments. If you do comment, it might take a couple of days before I get around to allowing it — I don’t check the comments to be moderated everyday.

In the long term, there are lots of solutions to comment spam. One of these days I’ll get around to figuring out which one is best. In the meantime, comments will have some latency.

-The Management

Read this “post”:1 and tell me that blogging is not _already_ a big thing. Or that it hasn’t already changed the world.

[1(Robert Scoble employee of MSFT, and not in PR)]http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2005/11/01/ross-doesnt-trust-microsofts-approach-to-web/

Here’s a good one:

bq.. Well, I fully agree with your comment. :)

BTW: I visited your blog earlier today and I just wanted to congratulate you on a well presented, and informative resource.

It’s not often that I come across a web site that offers a wealth of quality. :)

p. Yeah right. Buh, bye.