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From my mailbox: Comments that are more thoughtful than most comments from human readers

I just had some fun delving into the dark underbelly of the blogging world, thanks to this email that showed up in my mailbox:

Greetings Frederic,

My name is Jason Thompson and today is the official release of my latest software creation, known as Blog Commentator.  I like to check the latest tech news at your site, and we share some of the same tastes, so I thought you might like what I’m doing.

Blog Commentator is a revolutionary new software that allows webmasters to automate the promotion of their sites by commenting on relevant blog entries.  It is revolutionary because it can leave “human-like” comments (assuring that they aren’t deleted) on auto-pilot.

Really – these auto-generated comments are more thoughtful than most comments from human readers!

It is a welcome change amongst the numerous comment spamming services, and if you want to see more, the website is (redacted

Thanks for your time,
Jason Thompson

At first I was convinced that this was only an early April fool’s joke, after all, it reads like badly written press release material and this line is pretty funny: “These auto-generated comments are more thoughtful than most comments from human readers!”

I have seen my share of idiotic comments here and elsewhere, but it prompted me to take a dive into the world of the blogosphere I have probably naively ignored for too long. What I found was the promised automatic commenting software, bad sales pitches, fake testimonials, a bot for StumbleUpon (is your website hungry for visitors), and a world where spam is a good world and everything seems to cost $97 for some reason.

I feel dirty now just for looking at this. There is so much more I could say about this stuff…

So listen to this:

I’m working at France telecom R&D labs as a contracting analyst for channels. They are looking at different text mining technologies, and brand monitoring of the public corpus is my AOI.

So, to see how the blogs and forums are gamed – we researched who is making re-writing engines that just make splog posts and re-written blogs from whole cloth using sophisticated and dumb thesaurus technology.

Viola, in comes a vendor from the Eastern Bloc, and they have a splog re-writing engine, mostly for generating ad-sense revenue.

So, there you have it – ersatz comments, ersatz posts, re-used posts. Death of the blogosphere.