When I was a child, I had friend, Sheila R., who once bit somebody. When her mother found out, she bit Sheila...hard. Left a black-and-blue mark in the shape of her teeth on her seven-year old’s upper arm. It shocked me. Mothers are supposed to set examples, not teach lessons by engaging in the same painful behavior that warranted punishment in the first place.
I had the same reaction when I read Chris "Mr. Long Tail" Anderson's blog item today in which he publishes hundreds of email addresses from "PR people" who supposedly send him emails he has no interest in receiving. What shocked me is that I'm on this list and I'm most decidedly not a PR person.
Poor Chris is simply exhausted from clicking his delete button because PR people are "lazy flacks" who can't be bothered with targeting the right journalist at Wired and instead send their emails to "editor@wired.com"canderson@wiredmag.com. He's also soooo terribly busy that he can't unsubscribe to the emails either. So, he's exacting his revenge by metaphorically biting these folks on the arm. He's exposing them to spam harvesters because "turnabout is fair play."
What Chris doesn't recognize is that everybody, even the lowliest blogger, gets hundreds of unwanted emails per day. It's just that most of us aren't big enough tools to publish everybody's email address so that spambots can capture them.
Too bad Sheila R.'s mother passed away years ago. She and Chris Anderson would have gotten along swimmingly.
Update: One commenter pointed out that I didn't originally read his post carefully and that's right. I was at Boston Logan's airport boarding a flight, reading the post on my cell phone and misquoted the email address that Anderson objects to. This commenter also points out that it's not Anderson's job to "mother" people. Again, that's right. So why is he out to teach PR people a lesson? My point is that he's subjecting people to spam when he himself views PR emails as spam, which is a harsh, cruel "do as I say not as I do" kind of treatment. He's an editor of a widely read publication and is in the wrong business if he's so sensitive about misdirected PR pitches.
Update: Another commenter asks why I was "spamming" Chris Anderson. First off, I wasn't really spamming him in the sense of selling him male enhancement pills or anything. Secondly, the email service I use always allows for recipients to unsubscribe. On top of that, I periodically send out emails asking people to take themselves off my list if they don't want to continue receiving emails. Really, all he had to do is send me an email, or unsubscribe from my emails. He didn't have to try to expose me to thousands of people who will now send me emails about male enhancement pills (I'm already on their lists anyway, but it's the malicious intent behind Anderson's item that really rankles.)
But, as best I can figure, I got his email address because he was on a press list provided by a PR firm that I worked with on an event I hosted. I would have never, ever guessed that a journalist and editor would be so easily knocked off center by unwanted emails, however.
One other option: someone else who works for the National Cable and Telecommunications Association and whose email address begins with "canderson" asked to be included on my email list. I accidentally copied from my Outlook autofill Anderson's email address instead. (I once sent him an email directly and he's in my address book.) But the bottom-line is that I don't know why he received emails from me, but he's clearly not ever going to get another one.
Update: Valleywag has this great item that points out that Anderson's own Wired is a spammer just like Anderson's shameful list of scarlet letter communicators. I knew that I too had received "unsolicited" emails from Wired.com, but like most sane people, I deleted them without a lot of drama and they got lost forever when I shut down Outlook.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:15 PM | Print | Comments (10)
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