Blog Spam Poetry

I’m inspired this morning to think I may create a weekly or monthly blog spam poem, assembled from the best lines of comment spam this blog recieves.

My favorite blog spam comment of the day (with no link so as to not encourage them, and therefore no credit):

Candy cheap folklore urged birth heroic, carpet stain removal?!

Maybe it’s the faux sentimentality of the “birth heroic” smashed up against the prosaic “carpet stain removal,” but I like this particular piece of candy cheap folklore.

Candy cheap is like really really cheap – one step below bottom-shelf-liquor-cheap.

This little light of mine . . . I’m gonna turn it off

In case you live under a rock or haven’t read news in ~2 weeks online, Facebook Beacon is an application which allowed third-party web sites to access your Facebook cookie and post messages to your activity feed regarding your purchases.

For example: “John bought Finding the Perfect Job at Amazon.com” – how would you like your boss seeing that one in your activity feed!

(Note: I don’t believe Amazon actually participated – it’s just an example. Jeff, please don’t sue me).

Well, the powers that be at Facebook have finally publicly apologized for the whole snafu.

In what is becoming a bit of a tradition, Zuckerberg addressed the angry multitudes directly in a blog post titled “Thoughts on Beacon“:

We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.

They also created, and Zuckerberg linked to, a single global setting enabling you to block beacon: Privacy Settings for External Websites

Even this setting is a bit difficult to understand, though, since it appears to say that you will still recieve notifications on those third party sites that they are requesting to send stories to Facebook:

Show your friends what you like and what you’re up to outside of Facebook. When you take actions on the sites listed below, you can choose to have those actions sent to your profile.

Please note that these settings only affect notifications on Facebook. You will still be notified on affiliate websites when they send stories to Facebook. You will be able to decline individual stories at that time.

So when I check the box marked “Don’t allow any websites to send stories to my profile,” am I still going to have to decline individual stories?

One assumes not, but I guess they haven’t had time to change the interface the external providers use, so they will still make requests.

Just one question

11:15, Geneva time, from the lobby of the Ramada Park Hotel, as I catch up on blog comment moderation.

Has anyone, ever, anywhere in the universe, actually purchased Xanax based on a blogspam comment? Or even visited the link to which the Xanax push pushes?