[Sigia-l] Spamming this list

[Seth Earley]

It's a legitimate point.  I like the book, and have noticed a few messages
reminding people of various aspects.  Promoting a book is a tough balance.
Peter needs to take advantage of market momentum and gain exposure, so I
understand what he is doing and personally it does not bother me.  But it
may seem repetitive to others.

You mentioned that a book does not promote/strengthen the community as the
other vehicles might.  There may be a way that it can have more direct
benefit to the community.  Not sure how, but it's an angle to consider.

Seth
Seth Earley
Earley & Associates, Inc
781-444-0287
781-820-8080 cell
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-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org]On
Behalf Of Trenouth, John
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2005 4:21 PM
To: sigia-l at asis.org
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Spamming this list


Looks like I've caused a bit of trouble here.  I'll try to clarify
(hopeful without stirring up even more trouble).

Ziya was right when he said that we are all promoting and exchanging
ideas here.  And I agree that this is the whole point of these lists.
But when promoting ideas becomes promoting commercial products we start
getting into dicey territory.  And when all the posts from a member
begin to contribute little more then "buy my meme-book" then it becomes
spam.

The term "spam" started with a lawyer who posted thousands of
immigration services ads across Usenet.  It was so called after Monty
Python's famous "spam" skit where every menu item had spam, because
every newsgroup seemed to have the same green card ad.

Spam isn't just in the perception of the beholder.  The Breidbart Index
measures newsgroup spam in terms of cross posting and multiposting.
Multiposting refers to a single author repeating the same message, and
only that same message, over and over again.  The Breidbart Index give
more weight to multiposting than to crossposting in terms of determining
what is spam and what is not.  Posts that achieve a score over 20 are
automatically deleted from news servers using the index.  This index can
also be combined with content filters to identify advertising.

Yes the Ambient Findability book and topic are highly relevant to this
community.  And the "buy my meme-book" message was a valuable
contribution the first time it was posted months ago.  However, relevant
subject matter of the promoted commercial product is absolutely *not*
the issue (maybe the green card ads really were valuable to some Usenet
users).   The multiposting of the same limited commercial "buy my
meme-book" message over the past few months as the author's *only*
contribution is the issue--its practically the definition of newsgroup
spam.