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MySpace just won a $230 million judgment against Spamford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines for violations of CAN-SPAM and California anti-phishing laws, plus attorney fees. Ole Spamford was proud to be the Spam King and I’m sure he’ll find a way to show off now that he holds the record for the largest award ever in a spam related case.

MySpace won when Wallace and Rines failed to show, which means that there will be some kind of appeal, dragging this out further. The pair was accused of using their own as well as other’s phished accounts to send 730,000 messages promoting ring tones and other money making schemes. CAN-SPAM authorized $100 per violation, which is trebled when the messages are sent “willfully and knowingly.” 730K messages at $300 each is $219 million, so I think the real number is actually 736,000 messages based on the actual award in the article.

What is most interesting to me was the short snippet at the very end of the article: “MySpace has another anti-spam case pending against a high-profile defendant, Scott Richter, who it claims gained access to MySpace profiles using stolen passwords and then sent spam bulletins from those accounts.”

View original post here:
MySpace Wins a Big One, Is Scott Richter the Next Target?

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One news list that I am on with another ReveNews blogger had a message today that I thought was fairly interesting – Spam is 30 years old. The first spam message was sent on May 3rd, 1978, according to this article by Brad Templeton:

http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamreact.html

The message was sent by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) to drum up attendance for two product presentations in California. It elicited a negative reaction from the community and apparently became a conversation piece. The post includes email commentary such as this:

I don’t see any place for advertising on the ARPAnet, however; certainly not the bulk advertising of that DEC message. From the address list, it seems clear to me that the people it was sent to were the Californians listed in the last ARPAnet directory. This was a clear and flagrant abuse of the directory!

When you go back and look at the history of companies or industries, it’s amazing to me to note that generally things started further back that you might think and that there were a lot of early companies that since fell by the wayside. For example, Mr. Templeton used to have a content site in 1989 called ClariNet.

I am reading a book right now called Founders at Work – a collection of interviews with founders and early employees at companies like Apple, Adobe, and Yahoo!. They all had competition, as early as they were, but went on to become powerful, well-known companies. Google is another example. John Battelle, author of The Search, points out that nobody thought search was what people wanted, a statement echoed by Tim Brady of Yahoo! in Founders at Work. Other companies, like Excite and Netscape, flourished briefly but are now mostly memories. Another good book (while I’m at it) on the history of the internet is Where Wizards Stay Up Late.

Not only email, but spam existed 30 years ago. Most people had no clue. I never heard of it until I went to college. It makes me wonder what other technologies might be widely in use among certain populations today that are not widely known but someday will be. And what companies will make money off those technologies by hook or by crook.

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Happy (Belated) 30th, Spam!

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I expect something tasteful in a place of mourning and remembrance. Maybe I am old-fashioned but ads for LavaLife, who has never been the most subtle advertiser in the dating industry, on a site meant to be a memorial for loved ones is not what I expect to see. Imagine heading down to your local cemetery and seeing a billboard on cemetery grounds that says “Come to where mature singles click”.

What exactly is the message to the consumer? “Now that you’ve lost your loved one and are single again…”

The ad is on a site called Tributes.com which received 4.5 million dollars in funding last week, according to Wired Magazine. The site was put together by Monster.com founder Jeff Taylor and is supposed to help facilitate “a new, important, way of grieving”. Makes perfect sense to display a LavaLife ad.

Now to be fair, the ad, which is posted through DoubleClick, does seem to be a remnant display. Put in rotation to target a certain segment of web property, it just happened to display on the Tributes.com beta landing page.

For me it is the perfect example of the kind of misstep marketers need to avoid.

Tributes.com is supposed to be a community where people can come together to grieve and share memories of their loved ones. Every community has a particular purpose, a particular reason people have come together to socialize. If you are a marketer representing a particular brand you should be very aware of how your message will be delivered to that community. The question of whether or not an ad is appropriate is as equally important as whether or not it is engaging.

This week’s ThoughtShapers highlighted a quote by Chris Brogan, Vice President of Strategy & Technology at CrossTech Media and social media guru, where during an interview with MarketingProfs he said, “When marketers see social media as yet another channel to drive a message down, they’re missing the boat. Worse, they’re making themselves look insensitive, unpleasant, and not worth the community’s time.”

Definitely the term “insensitive” and perhaps even the term “unpleasant” can easily be associated to the wayward placement of the LavaLife ad.

I also think there is a greater note of caution which should be heeded.

Recently when I was at the Web 2.0 Expo the exhibit hall floor was filled with companies pitching instant shake and bake communities so merchants could socialize their brand. It is the real life equivalent of an auto dealership providing coffee for its patrons. If I am there to buy a car I may well appreciate the coffee. It doesn’t mean I am going to go hang out the local dealership in place of my favorite coffee joint.

Successful communities form in an organic manner. Dressing up advertising creative to look like a community simply to get a message across is not the same as developing a true community.

With this corporate rush to embrace social media it will be interesting to see if there will be a consumer backlash. Soon we will know whether this glut of corporate social sites will be boom towns or ghost towns.

Continued here:
Bring Out Your Dead

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