Sometimes, the Internet acts like a live amorphous being ready to lash out at users who poke it. Okay, that's a little melodramatic. Maybe a lot melodramatic, but I've noticed some interesting issues.

More Than Survey Responses

Last month, I launched an online survey, and to publicize it, sent emails out through listservs and postings to various eLearning sites. I got maybe a couple dozen responses on the survey, which was a complex one, but also, I had a flood of spam emails at the contact email I'd provided. I couldn't tell if there was any human intelligence behind the spam messages and suspect that it was all automated. And no, I didn't buy any of the pharmacy products or enhancements sold.

Scraping Digital Barnacles

Running a blog comes with its own set of challenges. The one I want to talk about here though has to do with automated messages that are posted by programs advertising all manner of drugs, services, websites and ideas. I imagine that if humanity just sort of left the WWW alone for a moment (impossible though that may sound), these automated code-strand critters would still keep multiplying and sending messages out...like freeloading barnacles to cling to blogs and anything else that would have a surface on which these might adhere. Until we put in technological protections against automated message posters (our savvy usability and all-around design-and-tech guy says Captcha or the "Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart"), human time will be spent now and again to delete these spam messages left by bots. This is all about trying to keep the information from being encrusted.

Darker Yet

Tougher yet are those comments posted by apparently real people which have nothing to do with the blog entry's topic or the blog altogether. I want to think an unthinking machine posted those... so I'll just do a refocus back on topic--the issue of electronic storms and digital barnacles.

Going out in public seems like an invitation to be hit by lightning, in a manner of speaking.