Spam, keywords, and quoting
\begin {rant}
First, it was inarguably spam, and inappropriate for the mailing
list - but not because it was spam, because it had nothing to do
with Euphoria (the programming language from RDS). Had he been
advertising open-source software written in Euphoria, I'd have
had less-or-no objection to seeing the ad.
Second, if a website uses keywords in a META keywords tag, and
those keywords have nothing to do with the content of the site,
it may very well _not_ be actionable - but it sure as hell
devalues the search engine that makes its offerings based in
whole or in part on those keywords. Too many people pull that
kind of fecality, and search engines like AltaVista go away (from
lack of use due to excessive false positives), and all you have
left are human "moderated" directories, like NewHoo or About.com.
The latter aren't _bad_ - but with internet access and web sites
expanding as rapidly as they are, there's just no way they can
keep up.
Third, the entire thread on the spam and the keywords was longer
than it needed to be, because too many people included the entire
text of the entire thread in their replies - including the HTML,
whose utility in email is at present questionable at best.
People, a little judicious trimming of quotes is a good thing; it
lowers bandwidth and prevents those of us who get the list via
digest from having to page through the whole ^%@#$%^ thing four
times to find any messages that have the slightest possibility of
being interesting or useful. Yes, I know, spam is a trigger -
but email keeps, and it's always better to CALM DOWN BEFORE YOU
PULL THE TRIGGER. That way, you don't subject the whole list to
your flamewar.
\end {rant}
--
Jeff Zeitlin
jzeitlin at cyburban.com
|
Not Categorized, Please Help
|
|
