PG has been neglecting his spam bucket. Yesterday, he found the following:

Now she is going to Nevada in senator Reid’s residence town and look as an idiot. That’s down out impolite and an American to go in a few after dwelling city and generate a huge spectacle.

The poster was Nomad Parka Canadian Goose

A gem from the spam bucket:

I just couldn’t leave your website before suggesting that I really loved the usual info an individual supply in your visitors? Is gonna be again incessantly to check out new posts.

PG has not visited The Passive Voice’s spam bucket recently.

An interesting dialogue is price comment. I think that it is best to write more on this topic, it won’t be a taboo subject but usually individuals are not sufficient to speak on such topics. To the next. Cheers.

Put on jeans along with a Black Sabbath T-shirt if that is definitely that which you have. Go to worship….

PG has neglected his spam bucket lately. Look what he almost missed.

Thank you a lot for providing individuals with a very wonderful opportunity to read in detail from this website.

It is usually very superb and as well , jam-packed with amusement for me personally and my office co-workers to visit your web site no less than three times a week to read the fresh secrets you have.

And definitely, I am just actually motivated with your gorgeous suggestions served by you. Certain 2 points in this posting are basically the most impressive we have had.

PG hadn’t consulted the spam bucket lately and was pleased to find another minor masterpiece when he did:

I precisely needed to appreciate you once more.

I am not sure what I could possibly have done in the absence of those opinions revealed by you about such a situation.

It had been the fearsome situation for me personally, nevertheless encountering the very professional avenue you handled the issue made me to leap for joy.

From Kristen Lamb’s Blog:

With the good, comes the bad, the ugly and the downright—in my POV—boneheaded observations about social media. My favorites?

. . . .

Twitter is not Our Personal Spamming Tool to Sell Books

How many of you loooooove spam? There is nothing you love better than interacting with automatically generated messages. What? No takers?

Every time I warn writers off automation, I get some person who wails in protest the same, exact words. “I am not automating tweets, I am scheduling them.”

All right, let’s peel back the euphemism here. Anything that is posted on the Internet/social media automatically without a flesh and blood human being physically present is SPAM. Of course, when I say this, the spammers“marketers” often howl, “But I spend a lot of time crafting those tweets.” Okay, so you are an eloquent spammer. Better?

Here’s the thing, spam is anything automatically generated for the sole purpose of gaining something from the community. Whether that is for that community to buy a book, look at a link or come to a blog or give us their attention, it doesn’t matter, IT IS SPAM.

Link to the rest at Kristen Lamb’s Blog and thanks to Lynn for the tip.

PG sympathizes with the anti-spam sentiment, but thinks Kristen’s definitions may be a bit overbroad.

To wit, PG needs time for a professional and personal life so he typically prepares several blog posts at a sitting then schedules them to appear, typically at one-hour intervals through the first part of the working day.

He does this for a couple of reasons:

1. He likes to have each post appear at the top of the blog for a period of time for maximum visibility.
2. He thinks it’s generally good blog marketing to have fresh information for visitors who check in at various times during the day.

Each blog post automatically generates a tweet on @PassiveVoiceBlg, something else Lynn calls spam. PG does this because he likes to be alerted via Twitter when someone he’s paying close attention to puts up a new blog post. PG’s theory is to try to provide information to followers where they want to consume it – the blog, Twitter or Facebook.

While PG doesn’t like spam, he doesn’t think the quality of the communication on The Passive Voice would be enhanced if he opened up the blog several times per day to manually make a new blog post that immediately appeared, then opened up Twitter to write a tweet about the post then opened up Facebook to make the post there.

Without scheduling and the tools he uses, there would be far fewer blog posts available during the times PG budgets for blog work. He’s never had anyone complain that there is too much info on The Passive Voice and receives more suggestions for blog posts from visitors than he has time to create posts.

OTOH, he certainly understands how the techniques and tools he uses could be misused for spam.

Lynn’s problem may be with Twitter management.

Following people on Twitter is one good way to generate additional followers on Twitter. Unless you’re a rap star, follows and follow-backs are SOP for most Twitter users. However, once you get a lot of followers, the inflow is huge. @PassiveVoiceBlg has over 28,000 followers and PG has followed back a lot of them. During prime time, it’s not unusual for 25 incoming tweets to happen every 5 seconds.

PG won’t go into the details of his Twitter management because he’s about out of budgeted blogging time (at 8:30 PM on Wednesday night), but there are lots of free tools to help manage the flow and bring important/relevant tweets to the surface. Hootsuite is one of the tools PG uses every day, for example. He almost never opens the interface provided by Twitter.

We haven’t consulted the Spam Filter for wisdom lately.

I like this web blog very much, Its a rattling nice situation to read and obtain info.

“Taint’t worthwhile to wear a day all out before it comes.”

PG’s spam bucket has been sadly neglected. He almost overlooked this gem:

Needed to send you that bit of word to say thanks again with your marvelous techniques you have contributed on this page.

It has been simply generous of people like you to convey freely exactly what a few individuals might have offered for an electronic book in making some bucks on their own, most notably considering the fact that you might have done it in case you decided.

These thoughts additionally served as the fantastic way to be sure that many people have the same zeal just like my own to grasp way more in regard to this matter. I’m sure there are thousands of more enjoyable periods up front for individuals that scan your website.

From CNN Money:

Perhaps it should be called Spamazon.

Until recently, if you had typed “Steve Jobs Isaac” into the online retailer’s search box, the first choice that popped up wasn’t the best selling book by Walter Isaacson, but instead one with the same name and a similarly sounding author, Isaac Worthington. The book appears to be selling, even though Amazon’s one reviewer gives the book a single star and calls it a “poorly produced pamphlet.” Presumably, Worthington’s book is based on exclusive interviews with Jeve Stobs.

There are a number of books on Amazon with similar titles to much more popular ones. Fifty Shades of Grey, the steamy romance novel that has created buzz around the world, is the No. 1 selling book on Amazon. Also available on Amazon: Thirty-Five Shades of Grey. Both books are written by authors with two first initials – E. L. James and J. D. Lyte – and both are the first in a trilogy about a young girl who falls for an older, successful man with a taste for domineering sex. The publisher of the bestseller Fifty says the book is “a tale that will obsess you, possess you, and stay with you forever.” The author and publisher of Thirty-Five, which came out in early April, apparently believe that description fits their book as well, word-for-word. Also selling on Amazon is I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Twilight New Moon. Neither is the book you are likely looking for.

. . . .

It’s perhaps more shocking that Amazon not only sells the books, it’s also helping their authors create them. All of the apparent copycat books that Fortune found on Amazon were made through CreateSpace, which is a division of Amazon. Authors can use CreateSpace’s system to design and self-publish their own books. The books then go on sale on Amazon and other sites. Amazon splits the proceeds with authors. It’s a different relationship than most publishers have with their authors, but there is no way for consumers to know that. On Amazon and other sites, CreateSpace is listed as the publisher of the books.

“It’s the book equivalent of spam,” says lawyer Eric Rayman, a former attorney for Simon & Schuster. “Amazon should be taking steps to stop this. It’s bad for consumers and it’s bad for the book business.”

. . . .

Karen Peebles, who is the author of I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, says she has self-published around 10,000 books though CreateSpace, not all of which are in her own name. “I am a single mother who home schools her children,” says Peebles, who says she sells “thousands and thousands” of books a month. “Self-publishing is a great way for me to make income. I receive a pretty nice royalty every month.”

Peebles says CreateSpace has guidelines, but they are minimal. Not only has Amazon never rejected one of her books, Peebles says she’s never even been questioned by the online retailer, not even about the one with a nearly identical title to the international bestseller by the late Swedish author Stieg Larsson. Peebles says her book, which she has sold “hundreds, maybe thousands” came out before Larsson’s. It didn’t. Larsson’s book was first published in 2004, and released in the U.S. in 2008. Peebles’ book has a 2008 copyright, but it wasn’t released by Amazon until mid-2010, well after the Larsson book had become popular in the U.S. Says a reviewer who gives Peebles’ book one star on Amazon, “Perhaps I will enjoy the author’s next book, ‘I am the Girl who Played with Fire.’”

Link to the rest at CNN Money and thanks to Dan for the tip.

PG’s experience is that whenever he’s reported a book as spam, Amazon zaps it pretty quickly.

Amazon’s Feedback box is, perhaps, too far down a book’s product page, but it’s definitely present.

Dan, who provided the tip, doubts the recent flurry of Amazon hit pieces is coincidental and who is PG to question a good conspiracy theory?

The spam bucket has been pretty unproductive lately, but it did cough up the following:

I’ve been surfing lnione greater than 3 hours nowadays, but I never found any attention-grabbing article like yours. It’s pretty price sufficient for me.