Jeremy, What's a boosted post?

I just got an email from the Facebook advertising team.

I get these because I was admin for a Facebook page while I was involved in a (successful) Kickstarter-funded comics project. I could take myself off the admin list but to de-admin yourself (as with so many things about Facebook Pages) you have to do a emotionally awkward things. Let me say right away that the other admin won't mind me having access. I'm 100% trustworthy. I may be involved again in the future. I'm an extra pair of expert eyes. My options are:

1. Re-open contact with the other admin and negotiate my removal. Rejecting, awkward, and emotionally challenging for us both! 
2. Remove myself as an admin.  Rejecting, awkward, and emotionally challenging for me now, and for the other admin when she notices later -  and probably quite hurtful, too.

So, you see the difficulty. I'll stay as admin, and take the emails and the bugging to promote posts (which, like so many things, isn't working as well as it used to) and we'll all be fine, probably....

But to get back to the email. The subject line was Jeremy, What's a boosted post? FFS, Facebook Ad Team, if you don't know, then we're all in trouble. I'm hoping you know!

Also, stop pretending to be my apprentice.  

on the difficulty of avoiding data devalidation

As is my wont, I was updating my website. In this case the key product I was linking to was the NHS Service Finder database. I smacked through a sample search (like you do) and my eye snagged on a thing halfway down the page. A thing I knew had not existed since 2011.

So I went to the button, you know the button, the one that opens a challenging half-remembered route to the data curators who keep your information in a reasonable state of validation (my memory ran something along these lines; there's some forms, and a phone number and a guy and a thing you have to do, but he knows his stuff so it's OK) but the button was gone, and in its place was a simple line of text: "This information was supplied by Serco Global Services on 12-03-2014"

OK, I thought. New route. "Report an issue with this information" link. Insta-auto-holding-reply received. Take it from there. Then I thought to myself, I wonder if [redacted] service is still there?

It was. Four years gone and repeatedly removed from everyone's databases.

But (and this is really the but) it persists, haunting the local databases, or those that don't (or barely) update, linked to long-gone web content, or copies of that content, or copies of copies of that content. We're guilty of it, to an extent ourselves; one of the sources I found was (or at least appeared) official, or from the right source, though I think it was a random scrap lost on a server somewhere.

 24 hours later, I get the email from the person. "This information has been passed to our third party information supply service. Please be advised it may take as long as 6 weeks for any changes to be reflected in the database."

Spare a thought for the information curators. I think about them a lot. Specifically I try to think about how to encourage them to try the emails and phone numbers they copy from database to database. Because they're dead, every one of them. The email, the phone number, even the web address (which was a surprise to me, I thought it was redirect to current content and oh, another thing for fixing).

We never want to throw away data, us humans. I remember the days I kept a careful list of all my database deletions, a list of the discontinuations, each with a justification that no-one would ever ask for. The services, clubs, groups, activities that make you go ooh! are the worst, persisting and re-entering for the sake of being interesting, that common currency of the internet.

Well, I have work to do. Time to attend to the synaptic pruning of the semantic web. 

A final note on skipping the email and phone call stage of three-point data validation and just relying on the web search; Google is adjusting its search around you constantly. If it looks like you're searching for evidence of long-discontinued services, it will give you evidence of long-discontinued services. And if you find yourself thinking, "ooh, that sounds like an interesting service," beware. Others have gone ooh before you.

the robots are at the door

I'm bringing the casual cover up to speed during a gap in the regular web editor's continuity.  Like all web systems, ours has its little quirks, and though I did a couple of intensive sessions on the way in there are always the odd bits that come out in dribs and drabs as the days go by. 

This morning I caught myself typing the words, "the robots are drawn to the more popular pages or those that have comments on them already, especially if those comments include images or links" by way of explanation following a more than usually unfortunate alert message dropping into the approval box. I adjusted the comprehensibility of the message while handing out disapproval to this comment (and another, considerably less offensive, message selling - a first for me - a gas-powered outdoor heater) reflecting on the sad truth of the matter.

Our CAPTCHAs are quite good. They're probably not robots.

leave me alone with your frivolous segmentation

Two events recently have focused my annoyance on the phenomenon of market segmentation.The first involved an email from a popular mailing list service provider. They'd sent me an urgent email explaining how updates to their system involved changing how certain aspects of their segmentation worked. It's a service that adopts a chummy, familiar tone, which does actually generally work in reducing the colossal annoyance of composing, analysing and maintaining mailing lists. But in this case, the chirpy apology for using the marketing jargon caused a wearying explosion of annoyance. "If you don't understand, please pass it to the person on your team who does deal with such things," oh ho ho. There's a sort of self obsession here which probably makes perfect sense from their perspective; after all, I'm sure they do have a department which deals in segmentation. But for those using their service, is this always the case? Is it not vastly more likely that their customers are juggling not just segmentation, not just this product, but the entire concept of online marketing with a host of other responsibilities and duties? Tread gently when you mock our ignorance of your specialisms; lest you discover where priorities truly lie.

And speaking of lying, the other vast explosion of annoyance at segmentation occurred as a mailing list I had been previously signed up to split into some fifteen-odd sub-lists, most of which I still needed to read. A sweary run through repeated triple-verified sign-up processes ensued as I tried to follow their reasoning (and the lack of a "just send me everything" tick box. Leave me alone with your frivolous market segmentation; mostly if I have signed up to it, I'm interested in it; and if something does fall a touch flat for me, hey, I really do have a nice handy right-there delete button.

the arrogant assumption of dedicated time

Great news! A popular online service tells me. You can now achieve [a list of a variety of things] with all the brand news features in our product and analysis tools. Learn all about it in our new webinar series! Hmm. Let me consult the vast wasteland of my diary. Let me consider all those afternoons that would stretch out in bleak silence, washed with bored and lonely tears.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a vast fan of progress. I love the fact that every item, service and product, no matter how small or slight, has or would benefit from having the careful focussed attention of intelligent individuals improving it. What I resent is the assumption from some larger services that there will be teams of dedicated and specialist people looking after their product. There is simply too much to do for any one service to command such attention, particularly as the gains in using these services are light, and that they cannot be delivered in isolation by anyone attempting to reach a universal audience.

You will get some attention, but frankly anything that requires a webinar series to learn is unlikely to be adopted by any but the most overstaffed and obsessive. Put it in a to-do list please. We'll get to it when we need it; and not before.

your brand says spam to me

In common with many other webmasters I got back from my Christmas break to find a Bad Thing. Someone had hacked a server somewhere and for three days over Christmas it had fired off a steady stream of commentspam into my filters before one of my counterparts toiling on the dataface came back from their Christmas break to discover their Bad Thing, and fix it. In the meantime, I set to clearing the gakk from my filters, speculating the while on why people spam. Mostly it ends up in filters, not marketing to anyone other than the person who has the aggravating task of clearing out the comments, for whom it is largely a negative experience. Although, in line with old-school attack, a proportion of the comments also had wordsalad subject lines, some of which were quite beautiful:

• vault owllike whiterump minginess
• indiscriminate negotiation dirtying pumple
• outstandingly semiprofessional flirting ellipse

(As an aside, I am not interested in advice about how to stop this problem (either my problem, or the site whose server got hacked) from happening using technical means. If you are interested in this as a technical problem, user maintained social networking sites like Livejournal and Dreamwidth are great places to try out your ideas and meet other people interested in solving the same problems.)

Although as a - what's the Yougov term? Dissatisfied Customer - of the aforementioned Livejournal, I do delete commentspam on a pretty regular basis, this was the first time in a while it had been a big enough job to include reflection on how the spam environment has changed in recent years. Wind back a year or two, and the Canadian Pharmacy crowd with their exotic lists of drugs were leading the field. In 2012, although there is a smattering of viagra, cialis, tramadol, tylenol, ativan and their ilk, the overwhelming majority is brandspam. Working through the comment pile for anything I needed to reply to or report, I realised I was using brand names to identify comments as spam. In fact, there were some brand names that I already associated with spam. Ugg? Spam. Christian Laboutin? Spam. Louis Vuitton? Spam, beyond a doubt.

Why does this happen? Is it popularity? The intensity with which a brand is ripped off and faked? Or is it just chance, that brand caught up in the roll of the black-marketing dice? Is it damaging for them, or do they feel (as some celebrities do) that all publicity is good publicity? Is there complicity?

Whatever the truth of the matter, I'd been given a snapshot. The state of spam, Christmas 2012. And here are the brands under the spammer's Christmas tree:

• Christmas Top of the Pops: Uggs, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Christian Laboutin, Lasix, Tom's Clogs, Mulberry, Michael Kors, Chanel, Pandora Charms, Dr Dre Beats, GHD hair straighteners
• Christmas classics: Viagra, Canadian Pharmacy, Cialis, Ativan, Zoloft, Flomax, Tylenol, iPod, Ativan, Clomol, Flagyl, Nike
• Contemporary Christmas Gifts:  Chilliwack, Tiffany's, North Face,  Canada Goose, G-Star, Thomas Sabo, Hunter Wellies, Zithromax, Adirondack

Thanks all, for the unexpected Christmas gifts in spam filters and inboxes across the world. Thanks for the thought, and the lack of thought. Thanks for the endlessly sapping process of overengineering and upgrading filtering systems and the sites down and broken and the information pollution and all of the Christmas messages lost in the seasonal spamfall. It's nice to know exactly how much you care.