This entry received the following comment:
You can’t compare each round as a parallel test because they move the tee boxes and hole locations every day. This makes the course much more difficult on some days and that is what separates the best from the worst.
a href=”http://www.sporthaley.com” Women’s Golf Clothing /a
(I’ve purposely unlinked the html.) Also, the commenter’s name is given as “Women’s Golf Clothing,” and the above link is given as the referring url.
I don’t know what to make of this sort of thing. It’s hard for me to believe it’s pure spam–could a bot really read the entry and make that comment? But what person would sign his or her comment as “Women’s Golf Clothing”? We get this kind of semi-spam on the blog comments now and then, and I’m never sure what to think about it.
P.S. Just to be clear, here’s another comment that clearly is 100% spam. It’s for the blog entry on “Baby Names,” it’s by “baby boy,” and it says, “I can think of “yang” names, you can never know.” That’s clearly spam, unlike the above comment which was human-generated.
I've seen speculation of spyware that modifies blog comments based on the contents, adding an ad link and changing the poster's name. Spyware that intercepts http POSTs could certainly make such modifications. However, I haven't been able to find anything authoritative on the subject, and it seems like a poor choice of advertising vector–I'd guess that most people, for one reason or another, check their comments after posting, so the presence of the spyware is likely to be noticed fairly quickly.
Perhaps if a topic can be followed across several blogs via trackbacks, one could write a robot to get the text of a post from one blog, post it to another one, and stick some related spam URLs at the bottom.
I get this type of spam on my blog too. I think this is no different from the "fake" blog entry spam that shows up on Google and other search engines. It's not so hard to figure out the contents of a post or a blog and then they just string together random sentences that look pertinent. It's hard to understand why people would click on those links… perhaps out of curiosity?
I can't imagine why anyone would do such a thing.
I suspect that this is an example of a business owner or employee who searches for blog postings on a topic related to the business (and something that s/he knows about), and adds relevant comments with a link.
First, readers of that blog may be interested in the product/service and follow the link.
Second, provided that the blog doesn't add a nofollow attribute to the link, it increases the pages page rank, leading to higher placement on search results.
Third, although some bloggers, such as yourself, would count it as spam and remove or "moderate" it away, others would leave it since it has some relevance.
Eric
Could someone perhaps have written a nasty virus that catches people posting blog comments and alters them in include these links?
Wild guess: if a person's machine is infected with malware, it may intercept the comment posting and annotate it with its spam. Not a bad idea…
I think it’s much more likely a relevant comment generated by a human. It’s too appropriate to be machine generated, and if it was intercepted and altered, the original poster would notice.
Just tempted to pull out some recent ones I’ve seen on my blog:
”
Very interesting… always great to see what other people are thinking. Differing opinions is what makes this life so interesting. Check out my website to see my views on things www dot hypnotist dot com
”
This comment can be attached to any post regardless of content. Links to a “Hollywood hypnotist” according to Google.
”
Depending on the quantity of data, another viable option may be found at www dot VineTrekker dot com
”
There is no graph of any kind at that link, and the post has to do with software development, nothing to do with food or wine
(I replaced the links so you won’t accidentally click on them).
There are definitely automated spambots that will excerpt part of the entry that they’re commenting on, add a few words to it, and try to post it as a comment — I get these on my blog rather often. A common one is “I don’t agree with everything you say about [title of posting] but you have an interesting point of view,” followed by a url. Sometimes it even says something like “You might be interested in my page at the topic, at [url]” which of course has no relevant post. As Eric (above) speculated, these spambots are trying to raise the pagerank of that url.
But this comment is clearly not from a spambot, someone was actually commenting intelligently (though possibly incorrectly) on the specific post. I suspect that the “someone” is whoever runs that golf clothing store, but I wouldn’t rule out Koray’s idea of malware that replaces the name with a url.
Kaiser, Phil: Yes, I get lots of that sort of comment that’s either completely empty of content or clearly just picking up on one or two words in the entry. But this one (and some others) looked different, which motivated my entry above.
To all: I think Eric and Phil are probably right. And I understand why the commenter would post the golf clothing link. But it still seems funny to me that he or she would sign it “Women’s Golf Clothing” rather than “Bill” or “Mary” or whatever.
The post made a perfectly reasonable point about the non-IID nature of the samples. The signature was odd, but given the nature of web links and blogger identity, completely understandable.
As a computational linguist (writing from my hotel at the Assoc for Comp Ling’s annual meeting no less), I can unequivocally assert there’s no way that comment came from an automated system. Not in 2008.
I sent my dad the link, because I’d been trying to explain confidence intervals and simple hypothesis testing to him the last time I visited home. He read through the teaching article, confessed to not understanding most of the math, but claimed that you can’t just toss different courses and different holes into one mix, because the difficulty of a 10 foot (3m) putt mostly depends on the particular conditions on the day, which are heavily influenced by the groundskeepers (e.g. pin placement and green speed). Basically, the same point the “spammy” commentator made.
I suspect this is just a small business owner who surfs when things are slow and posts relevant comments on blogs linked to their web site.
It’s like the guy who posts on-topic on bicycle forums, whose signature always includes the fact that he has some condos in a vacation location for rent, and provides the link.
It’s a quality comment and I can’t see how this one could be auto-generated. If someone has software that good, the Turing test has been passed.
I think it could be "guerrilla marketing", where real people try to promote their sites by participating on blogs. Suppose you run a golf merchandise site. Well, you can use google and other engines to track all the important sites that post about golf, and then intervene.
But what about this: just email a few of the posters and ask them?
Can someone please verify that golf courses move their hole locations "every day"? As a non-golfer I can't verify. Am I the only one who thinks this statement doesn't make much sense?
Admit it, deep down you already suspected that the first application of something as profound as artificial intelligence could only be for something as puerile as spam.
Skynet exists, my friend, and it wants to sell you boner pills.
For golf tournaments, the holes (and sometimes the tee locations, which was done for the US Open) are indeed moved every day. At regular courses, generally not, but they can. It depends on the maintenance budget and the amount of play the course receives (the hole is moved to even out the foot traffic on and around the green).