I'm trying out @StopTweetNow to counter #spam on Twitter.

Mike Arrington on TechCrunch did an interesting thing a few days ago, he asked their readers if they should accept advertising from PayPerPost/Izea. Their readers made the right decision and voted that it would be disingenuous to accept advertising from a company that, in Michael’s words, pollutes the blogosphere. He also notes that TechCrunch is being held to a higher standard than most mainstream media would:

The comments that are most interesting to me are the ones that say we’re selling out if we take their advertising. I understand that we are held to a certain standard (and we hold ourselves to that standard), but it’s interesting that we supposed to do things that would never be asked of MSM.

While I’m sure there’s mainstream media which turn away advertisers because of social reasons, the point that we should hold flagship blogs to high standards is a good one.

On that point, I would encourage the crew at TechCrunch to re-examine their advertising and implicit endorsement of Text Link Ads, which pollutes the blogosphere in the same way PayPerPost does, by selling links with the intention of gaming Google. Just as PayPerPost “posties” were recently penalized by Google and Pagerank was one of the criteria that advertisers looked for when choosing which bloggers to give money to, Text Link Ads has been doing the same thing for years, they’ve just been more explicit about it. (And their corporate site has been penalized in Google for a long time.)

I should also note that if TechCrunch decides that the same reasons it decided to not accept advertising from Izea also apply to Text Link Ads, it’ll be operating at a higher standard than Google itself, who even though its business is directly impacted by the search engine spamming both of these companies practice allows both TLA and PPP to advertise via Adwords and Adsense.

It's not spam, it's bacn. A new email term was born this week — bacn, an intentionally one-vowel-short buzzword defined as:
Email you receive that isn't spam... And isn't personal mail. It's the middle class of email. It's notifications of a new post to your Facebook wall or a new follower on Twitter. It's the Google alert for your name and the newsletter from your favorite company.
While techies don't need yet another buzzword, bacn's definitely a growing issue. As it is I route bacn to a "when I have time" label in Gmail, and often I never get the time. How about you? How much bacn do you get—and what do you do about it?
Bacn [via The Social]

An offer: on the other hand, if any company would like free reign to pass off things on my blog as their own work I have a simple offer for you: give me a small stock option in your company, call me a 'technical advisor' or similar, and feel free to take

The spam contains an animated GIF with four frames. One of the frames (which contains the actual spam message) remains visible for 17 seconds. The other three frames are displayed for 10ms or 40ms, and each of those contains a little random noise and the

Akismet for PunBB

That guy’s really really mad! He gets as angry about spam as I did in oh, say, 1996.