Creative spam technique

I ran across this creative bit of spam on my site today, in which tons of different urls were embedded into one short comment on my 10-month-old "Goon Squad" post. 

That post for some reason has been a spam magnet, generating four fake comments sine May. I quickly deleted the first three, which were very amateurish and made no effort to hide their intent. But in this latest go-round, a spammer embedded different links under individual letters, thereby cramming code for tons of different wristwatch sites into one ungrammatical sentence: "Thanks for you share it!!!!!!!" What looked  relatively innocuous on the surface was a snarl of spam underneath.

I've attached an image of the code rather than actual text so I don't replicate the spammer's original intent to drive search traffic. If you have good eyes and know basic html, you can track the secret message.

If only people this creative actually put their talents to productive use.

Grantland takes on MTV's early history

I wrote a few months ago about ESPN's new digital magazine Grantland and its commitment to stray beyond its foundation in sports. 

The latest evidence of that is a fantastic hourlong podcast on the early history of MTV hosted by gonzo journalist Chuck Klosterman (author of one of my favorite music books "Fargo Rock City.") 

Klosterman chats with Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum, authors of "I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution," on the origins of the network; why execs embraced Spring Break content (think beer money); why British New Wave bands got airplay over American acts, specifically black artists; and why hair-metal bands were among the few artists to show up on time for MTV appointments. There's even an interesting discussion of Billy Squier's "Rock Me Tonite" video, which Squier said effectively ended his career. 

This is a podcast that's great fun and informative, and one that makes me want to read the book, which hits stores in late October.

A digital Pompei

The Deleted City from deletedcity on Vimeo.

Regular readers know how I feel about preserving our rapidly disappearing history. So I was thrilled to learn about efforts to save the Geocities from the trash heap.

A fascinating effort from the Internet Archive called The Deleted City is dedicated to bringing back to life -- at least in read-only form -- Geocities.com, a once-thriving digital ecosystem of amateur community that Yahoo bought for $4 billion in the late '90s, then shuttered two years ago.

I never blamed Yahoo for pulling the plug on something that clearly was not making them money or pulling in traffic, but digital historians and the millions who created a Geocities page shuddered at the thought of so much ground-breaking digital history disappearing ... just like that.

The Deleted City is the safety valve, a data visualization of 641 gigabytes of Geocities data that "depicts the file system as a city map, spatially arranging the different neighbourhoods and individual lots based on the number of files they contain." To think that so much data was not only saved but in a highly visual format is amazing.

It goes to show you what can be done when smart people put their heads together. And it's reassuring to know the folks at Internet Archive have a big project under their belt. Who knows when another once-dominant community -- say MySpace -- shows up on life support.