omg geek bra!!!!!!!!!!

courtesy of today's xkcd: whoever finds me one of these, or even tells me where there is a store where i can buy one of these myself, will have my undying gratitude.

i haven't been this annoyed by spam in a long time.

i am proud of this blog. this blog is my home on the internet. no matter what has happened in my life, i have spent a lot of time and energy making sure this blog was full of all kinds of absurd, weird, and generally useless content...and that it is therefore an accurate representation of what is going on in my brain. it's not visually flashy, but it doesn't have to be. making this visually flashy would add nothing to the content, and i find the minimalist decor to be tasteful.

apparently, this is not enough in the fast-moving blogosphere. i got the following offer in my email:



sending that? to me? what a failure in targeting marketing.

sure, some blogs feel the need to get advertisers. blogging, as was probably inevitable, has gotten to the point that some people are trying to do it professionally. to blog professionally, you need income. to make income from a website, you either need your blog to be owned by a company that is paying you to keep it, or you need advertisers to pay that income in return for space on a well-visited blog page. it's common sense.

but, you all know what kind of blog this is.

why would i want to "connect with advertisers"? why would i want to vie for the chance to have three douchebag "blog design experts" give my blog an "extreme makeover" in order to make my chances to "connect with advertisers" somehow better?

the whole point of a blog is that you can be a "shack among mansions." sure, mansion types are starting to adopt blogging, but the beauty of the form is that people can make of it what they wish. they don't have to court advertisers or make income in order to make what they want of their blog, if that's not their goal. it can be frivolous or serious. it can be flashy or minimal. a blog can be just a place on the internet where a user can publish whatever they want, whenever they want, unfettered by the interests of anyone else.

this is my blog. i'm not trying to hawk anything; i'm not trying to convince anyone of an particular point of view. it's rantspace--my rantspace. it's eccentric, visually minimal, and it does exactly what i want it to do. friends, acquaintances, and new readers are always welcome. advertisers, not so much; whatever izea is, it can go back to florida where it came from, because i'm not interested.

~~~~~

if the fact that they're not mismarketing their vapid hype services to personal blogs isn't ridiculous enough, their attempts to pass these ads off as not being spam are absolutely offensive. i almost missed it, but in tiny text below the big picture ad was the following text:

You were added to the system April 15, 2008. For more information click here.

the words "click here" were hotlinked. i had never noticed that sort of thing on spam before, and i was curious. so, i clicked the link. it sent me to a webpage with this¹ on it:



there is so much wrong with this. my gut tells me that they're trying to cover their bases under some anti-spam law. i really am not as familiar as i ought to be with anti-spam provisions. however, this worthless "documentation" smacks of someone's absurd effort to comply with the letter, if not the spirit, of some regulation.

first of all, it says "You have already been opted-in to the system." their use of the passive voice in saying i have been "opted-in" is proof positive that this is spam! for this to be a meaningful opt-in mailing list, it makes sense that the recipients are the only people who can opt in or out of the list. it would provide data about when i affirmatively signed up for the email list! otherwise, if anyone else is opting you in, then it means your email address is being harvested and added to a list without your consent: SPAM.

secondly, its explanation for how i was "opted-in" to their email list is completely unsatisfying. as the field for how they got my email address, it says "Email addresses provided by IZEA." what is that supposed to mean? i don't have an existing business relationship with IZEA; i had never heard of them until i got their spam in my inbox! sure, i know this is the third-party mailing company's way of saying that they merely sent the email, and didn't harvest the addresses. but, it's just as bad if all they can say about the origin of the email addresses is that the company who hired them to send out the advertisements gave them the addresses to which to send the advertisements. sure, there's a possibility that the client came upon those addresses legitimately through business relationships and internet opt-in forms, but it's at least as likely that the client company either harvested the email addresses under the table, or hired yet another company to crawl the web and do the same.

besides, i wasn't signing up for any kind of dubious blogging "services" on April 15th. i was too busy filing my taxes, going to class, going to choir practice, and freaking out about a final paper that was due that week.

i didn't have time to think to myself, "hey! i'm not connecting well enough with advertisers! let me give my email address to some sleazy company i've never heard of, and hope that maybe one day i'll be cool enough for them to offer me an Extreme Blog Makeover!"


***
¹ i did make one edit to the image from their website: i redacted my last name. despite the fact that my last name isn't attached to my google account, my blog, or my gmail address, they somehow managed to find it and add it to my account. that's neither completely surprising nor a crushing blow to any naive notion i may have, since my full name is all over the internet in various places, but still...i'm just a little perturbed that these spammers have it.

*squee*

i did not know that Brian May, guitarist for Queen, is also an astrophysicist.

going to go have nerdgasm now. brb.