My first i-names spam

 I've been using an I-name (it is here) for a couple of years now and have never received anything I considered spam.  It's been a great way for me to get feedback and input (even if I haven't always been able to respond in a very timely fashion due to the demands of my “day job”). 

But today, that period of initial innocence came to an end.  It seems that Mr. Gerg, below, has built a little contraption that makes it past 2idi's email verification process.  I'd say my friends Fen and Victor, who created the Eden in which I've been living, need now to add a Turing test to their system.

Meanwhile, the proposal made by Mr. Gerg is “too muchie”. 

If the search engines are smart enough to figure out this kind of goofie manipulation, why go to all this trouble? Just because you can?

As shown at right, Dane Carson's memey little Technorati applet calculates the value of Mr. Gerg's property as being zero, compared to the bizarre value it places on mine (if anyone wants to buy, please send check).  When I look into Google's page rank, Mr. Gerg's property is just a “5”, even though it has about 4700 links, so Google has figured out the links are to things of very low value.  Seems like we might be getting somewhere with reputation.

So you would wonder why he would he spend his time building an engine that sends me i-name spam to do something that doesn't seem to be working in the first place. Anyway, if anyone wants to look at the pages he is referring to, you'll have to add the “p” to shopping that I removed from the URLs below – so as not to contribute any further links to his site or person.  I've also purposely misspelled his name.

Hello Kim Cameron,

My name is Alex Gerg and I am the manager of the project for http://www.shopingwallet.com

I have a proposal I would like to make. I have looked at your BLOG https://www.identityblog.com and think we can benefit from a partnership. Our site has more then 10,000,000 pages. Google, Yahoo and MSN each has already indexed over 300,000 pages with projected 2,000,000 pages in the next 2-3 month.
Google cached pages:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=GGLJ%2CGGLJ%3A2006-34%2CGGLJ%3Aen&q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.shopingwallet.com%2F+online+shoping

I would put your site’s text link to my site http://www.shopingwallet.com. Your link will be placed in our Partners  section at the bottom of our site on every single page, over 10,000,000 pages.

In exchange we would like to ask you to put a text link in the footer or in other section on your web site.

I am open to any other suggestions you might have for partnership. Please fell free to ask any questions or offer other forms of partnership. I would appreciate your reply.

Sincerely,
Alex Gerg
advertising@shopingwallet.com

***********************
Ths message was sent via your 2idi I-Name Contact Service.
Sender Information:

Email: advertising@shopingwallet.com
Real Name: Alex Gerg

Doing my research on how many links he has on different systems, I noticed that he's also spammed the list at the debian project.  I'll bet he's really going to pick up a whole lot of support there too…

Of course, maybe this is just a digital centrifuge intended to separate out the real suckers that he can then go after in some other way.

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Kim Cameron

Work on identity.