Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Mendacious spam from 'science.org'

The life of a blogger, even a lazy scoundrel with a shameful recent track record like me, is a life with a few different kinds of spam in it. I've had kooky invitations to review dodgy products (including things allegedly having sex pheremones in them). The latest one really takes the buscuit, though. Here's the text:

Dear Blog Owner,

Our website Science.org is a informational databases and online news publication for anything and everything related to science and technology. We recently ran a poll asking our website users regarding what online informational resources they use to keep up to date or even to simply find great information. It seems many of our users have labeled your blog as an excellent source of Science information. We have reviewed your blog and must say, we absolutely love the information you have made available to the public and would love to make your blog a part of our top science blogs. After browsing your blog, our research team has decided to award you a Top science Blogs award banner.

It is a distinction we offer to the blogs that our team feels is ahead of the curve in terms of content.

Thanks again for the great information and we look forward to the great responses your blog will receive from our site. Your blog presence will be very effective for our users (top science blogs).

We have put great efforts in making this decision to give deserving with award acknowledgment. For listing please reply to request banner.

Sincerely,
--
William Lee
Research team
Science.org

What a load of bollocks. There's occasionally some decent stuff here at Effortless Incitement, but nothing that would warrant this effusive gushing. So no, I won't reply to the request banner. Sod off and find some other way to drive traffic to your rather lousy site, why don't you. Ouanquerres.

(My mate Dave tells me this reminds him of the periodic dumbass 'invitations' to appear in directories of important people. These seem to get sent to just about anyone who publishes anything. And you have to pay. So they're really offering you the chance to appear in a directory of 'people so depressingly sad and stupid that they'll pay to appear in a directory containing only such people'.)

Oh, and a quick Google showed that Larry Moran over at Sandwall has receive the same invitation. He's a biochemist, but the blurb was effusive about his 'PHYSICS' information.

2 comments:

Darlene said...

I did a search for this "solicitation" and lo and behold look at this load of BS from the same person using multiple domains and names:

Google Search of Same Spam

so yea, its definitely spam, and the worst kind.

Doctor Spurt said...

Nice work. And yes, it's nasty stuff.