James Galvin

I’m seeing some referrals from this LiveJournal post by a member of the team behind Librarything regarding Shelfari’s unethical spamming strategy. When I wrote about Shelfari’s “confusing and deceptive” sign-up process last week, I did consider at the time that I was over-reacting, but now I see what a widespread problem Shelfari has caused. The Librarything Ideas Blog has gathered 51 similar blog posts on the topic. Mostly angry/annoyed users who accidentally spammed all their business contacts, listservs and long dead relations. The writer also makes allegations of more unethical practice by the Shelfari team:

We respect our competitors with one exception: the site “Shelfari.com.” We have always spoken our mind, so here’s a piece of it: Shelfari has gained traction by engaging in unethical practices, including astroturfing (posting on blogs pretending to be users, not employees*) and putting out press releases about how they invented the idea. But the worst has been their spamming campaign.

Astroturfing is a practice I’m familiar with, although I had never heard the term before - I think it might be illegal, but it is definitely “evil” (in the Web 2.0 sense). This spamming campaign is plain stupid, regardless of how many new users it brings in. With bad press like this, Shelfari surely have no choice but to change their policy and apologise to their users.

Via czajkowsk on IRC:

I’ve been subscribed to the security expert Bruce Schneier’s blog for a long time now. He has always urged people to refuse to be terrorised, as he collected stories about a paranoid society that sends the SWAT team after Indian poetry professors for recycling paper, and can’t tell a bomb from a tape dispenser.

Today, he has aggregated these bits and pieces into an article entitled The War on the Unexpected:

We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.

The article is both entertaining and disturbing, and with each ridiculous scenario he references, Bruce highlights a worrying trend which cannot be averted without some unlikely policy changes by administration officials. Cue a lot of angry comments from people who didn’t get it.