The Spaminator Strikes Again!

Since I started a blog, my eyes have been opened to the wonderful world of spam comments. Many of you will know what I’m talking about.  It’s always nice to get comments on a new post I’ve written, to hear what people think of it.  However, the trend seems to be for random, no-name internet companies to spam people’s blogs with comments containing links back to their own sites, in order to give it a higher search engine ranking.  Luckily for me, however, Wordpress has a setting so I can screen comments before allowing them to show up on my blog, so it didn’t take long for me to start using that.

An interesting perk of this new widespread SEO tactic is that I get to read the weird things that get posted.  While a good chunk of them just write random crap about health insurance rates or whatever, some of them pretend to actually try their hand at a real comment.  It’s pretty evident that these are being written by people who don’t speak English as a first language, or don’t even look at the page.  Here are a few of my favorites:

hi,good apple in your post,I love thatelegantapple,I need to find one for me,jane
Thanks, Jane.  I’m glad you noticed.  I hope you find the apples you’re looking for.

This has genuinely sparked up an concept in my brain.
Ouch. That hurts just thinking about it.

Hey myself came across your page by lucky on ask while hunt for something total irrelevantly but myself am very glad that myself did, Yourself have just captured yourself another subscriber.
Ah, yes.  Engrish.

Wow I'm honestly the only reply to this amazing read?!?
This was like the fifth comment on the page.  At least it was a coherent sentence though.

gratefulness you for your information.
You’re welcome…I guess...

gives use a terrific ınternet site decent Gives appreciate it for the working hard to support me personally
Wait, what?  I think you spilled a little bit of dictionary on my page.

To those of you who actually read, gratefulness you!

StreetWars

I can't remember where I heard about the idea for StreetWars, but I think sounds like a fun idea.  It was invented (I guess that's the right word for it) by an organization of the same name, that sets up and runs games in big cities all over the world, and thousands of people get in on it every time.  Each person is assigned a "target," who they have to hunt down and "kill" with a squirt gun.  When you kill someone, they give you the information on their target, who then becomes your new target.  This continues until everyone except one is dead.

I decided to run an experimental group game involving several of my friends.  I figure in a way it's an exercise in marketing, which is one of the subjects I'm focusing on in my MBA.  I had to decide on the Product  (the game itself), the Place, the Promotion (mostly word of mouth and Facebook), and the Price (participants have to buy their own squirt gun, at the dollar story or whatever, so as not to end up too expensive).

If this little experiment leads to any interesting results or insights I will be sure to publish them.  In the meantime, the game is afoot!