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Interesting enough, I think part of my anger and contempt for sock puppeteers and aggressive internet jerkwads comes from the MetaFilter response to self-linkers and the like.

What happened to Iris also often happens to public libraries also. In my last two positions, I would often get emails from folks asking me (as the library director) to purchase a work. Most of the time it was from someone who lived many miles away. [It was also most often something that library would not have purchased even with huge budget increases.]

I get so many of those emails too, Jessamyn! Some I ignore and some I respond to. I hate how they try to make it personalized when it’s patently obvious that they’ve sent the same email to lots and lots of other bloggers.

Some people ask me to try out the new technology they’ve developed and I’ll do that if I have time and it’s relevant to me, but I will NEVER blog about something that I’m not legitimately passionate about.

It seems like I get several emails a week from people trying to sell a book. I have finally decided that this is ok. It is better to get them as email then wasting paper, which they would have done in a previous time. I think every library gets these. I just quickly delete most of them but now and then something catches my eye, as do the occassional postcards about items, and I research them more and sometimes purchase an item.

I don’t like a lot of advertising but I can tell you that I would rather get an email that I can delete over paper. I prefer to get paper over phone calls. The phone calls for real sales people are the most irritating and take up the most time and I NEVER purchase anything over the phone. But at least they are honestly representing who they are.

I never respond back to emails about some item I should purchase unless they are the ones that say that they are a local library patron. Usually they aren’t and I know this but I look in the system to find out for sure whether or not they have a library card. Like I said, they usually are not local and I then inform them that we only take requests to purchase an item from our own library users.

Nicely done. (Guest posts? That’s what you get for being MUCH more high-profile than me. I haven’t received such an offer in months. Too bad–I can always use a good laugh.) But, yes, even low-level bloggers like me get “your readers really need to know about this” emails on a fairly regular basis.

Great recommendation. What little content those websites address it is only a facade to their true intentions of obtaining and selling contact information to for-profit universities.

honestly i though the “:chocolate bar in a book” thing was funny… not trying to spam you… oh well.

I too get these emails and ignore them – I’m with you on this. I actually had friends tell me recently I was on some of these lists and I emailed them to tell them not to trust these sites, they’re too suspicious.

I’ve gotten many of these as well and asked them to stop e-mailing me. Thanks for writing this.

I not only get these, I usually get the email 2-3x which is a pretty good tipoff it’s not an individualized email :).

Thanks for the tip! I’m not far off creating my own website and blog and it’s great to know these sort of things.

I’ve been getting a *ton* of requests from these spammers. Looking at my logs, they are driving a significant amount of traffic to my blog, but I feel no obligation to help them out since I feel they’re profiting from my content.

I haven’t gotten any such requests yet; you people make me feel like such a nobody. However, people (bots?) often leave comments of the “Great blog; I’m definitely going to add this to my feed!” variety, with a link to some garbage site. Usually I delete the comments altogether, though if I’m in doubt about its authenticity I’ll just remove the link.

I just left a link to this post in the comments for this Booklist reference blog. Sigh.

Thank you for highlighting this. It seemed as if these popped up everywhere, but no one when out and called it what it is. I get frustrated when librarians do link to it (whether to praise or criticize).

Wait a minute, wait a minute … Aren’t by default blogger links of the “nofollow” type??? Google is not supposed to crawl onto urls posted on blogger sites. I’ve seen some people tweaking their blogger templates to make their urls “nofollow=false” and allow spamdexing. Am I just confused?

Sorry for not jumping on the bandwagon, but I respectfully disagree. I’ve got the librarian = information junkie trait, so if I find good information I recommend it and yes, even link to it, regardless of the junk surrounding it. In fact, I have a link to the Learngasm site (which I think is one of the offenders being cited here) on my blog. Of course, it’s followed by a commentary on how badly written many of the referenced sites are. ;-)

I’m glad you posted this because when I see some of these “best of” links on Twitter, my first thought is, “bullshit.” These are generic lists of the same stuff we already know. But I don’t want to say that because I’m just me, and who listens to me? But since it’s you saying it, maybe everyone will catch on to the scam. FYI, I let someone do a guest post last year on my blog because it’s not much of a blog (in the library world; in the world of awesomeness, it’s, well, awesome, but not so important in the library world). But I’ll try not to make that mistake again. These fly-by-night link whores shouldn’t get help from us because we should know better.

Yes, I’ve been guilty of linking to them. They’ve been around for a long time, I think, but seem to have ramped up this strategy lately and it is becoming annoying. Some people tell me they see value in the listings, and it does indeed bring traffic to my blog, but they are very poorly done having blogs in completely incorrect categories. Maybe we should take the cue and re-do the lists correctly if there is a need. ;-)

There is such a fine line between lists with value and linkbait.

It’s a bind, I admit. I really like chewy lists of good information but I also feel that there’s a blogging community in some sense and that people who just ask other people for incoming links [who don't comment, who don't otherwise have a personal profile] just seem like telemarketers of the internet world. They don’t seem to add any value and the existence of sites like theirs reduces, however infinitesimally, the value of the internet as a resource overall. Every time I see a list like that, I think “I should go make my own list, using good information not a quick Google and then bug people to link to that instead”

And jdoewy I don’t know about Blogger.com but wordpress definitely doesn’t make links nofollow by default.

[...] On not linking to thin-content (spammish) sites : Do everyone a favor, dont be taken in [...]