Autoreply

The truly diligent and underemployed amongst you may have been checking the responses to my blog, and you may have noticed that of late a lot of the responses have been, well, machine-generated. Yes, it's the newest thing, blog spam. Check out this response to my post on last Tuesday, entitled Nothing going on or somesuch

Thanks to my prodigious member all the hedge fund greyhairs want my male enhancement product magic!!

I hadn't understood how this was happening, but clearly the spammer has some sort of algorithm to find and grab select, less-frequently encountered words from the blog ("grey hairs", "hedge fund") and stick them into the response. Not the automated text generation is anything new. Bloomberg generates stories like that everyday ("Microsoft rose/fell by [trigger threshold] % on volume of x shares).

Oh yes. Look at the response to this entry. At least it's clever enough to include a link. It also shares the common trait of all of these things: they praise the blogger. "What a clever blog you have, do you collect coins?" This is good-old fashioned yankee ingenuity, even if it's furners at work.

Thing is, lets say I wanted some of this guy's male enhancement product. Who wouldn't? He's left me no link.