LAME

This is just a little memo to the five of you who read my blog:

I love it when I get comments on my blog. I think it's unfortunate that Blogger makes it hard for people to post them without having to go through a whole rigmarole of signing up & signing in and all that jazz, but I sure do love getting them from the people who have gone through the trouble. I love it when mAc comments, when my friends comment, when strangers with blogs of their own comment, and I love it when my mom comments. (Hi mom!)

You know what I don't love? Spam comments. As in, "You have a great blog, come check out my Britney Spears/Halloween/mortgage refinancing/penis enhancement web site!" Yeah, dude? I DON'T THINK SO.

I'm offended and frustrated by this kind of spam on so many levels. A person's email and blog are personal tools, and the community that these tools bring together is personal as well. Spamming someone's email or blog is basically the same as telemarketers calling during dinner. It's extremely intrusive. So you put your number on a "Do Not Call" list and send their lame-ass emails automatically into your junk mail folder (which, by the way, I still have to check, since the exclusive settings on Hotmail make it so that if a friend emails me with a new email address, it goes straight to my junk mail until I grant it access to my inbox).

Not only are they intrusive, but here's the thing that really kills me, the marketer: this approach can't possibly be working. I mean, come on now, there has to be a better way. Not that I'm going to use my own creativity and resources to figure out how to help some jackass who can't get a real job sell more units of some bogus vitamin that'll make you last longer in the sack. I'm just saying that it strikes me as a waste of time, money and resources for an extremely small return. Oh, and also it's STUPID.

In short, spam is LAME. This you knew, but there's more: from now on, if you want to post comments on my blog, you have to go through an extra word verification step that Blogger has set up to prevent unwanted comments from getting on my blog. Which sucks to the power of LAME, but if it keeps the spam off my blog, it works for me. If you know of a better way to keep my blog's comments open to the public and spam-free, I'm all ears.

Any comments?