How To Clog Del.icio.us With Spam

I seldom disagree with Steve Rubel, but his open praise for a new del.icio.us hack as a means of sending the equivalent of an "open letter" to anyone in the del.icio.us system is going to fill the system with spam:

[from Micro Persuasion: Reinventing the Pitch Letter with Delicious]

Using del.icio.us' network feature, Ozgur has developed a hack to send messages people you want to connect with, even if you don't know their email address. Basically, you find the del.icio.us ID of the person or people you want to send message to, you add them to your network, write them a message at shorttext.com, then bookmark this URL on del.icio.us and tag it for: username. You could send the message to several people all at once, including all of the most prolific bookmarkers on the site.

Open letters are just one possibility here. What if PR pros used this methodology to pitch reporters and/or bloggers who frequent del.icio.us regularly? You could pitch 10 reporters at once in an open way. Interesting. Great hack Ozgur.

Oh, yeah. Great. But instead of using the "for:" suffix in the hack (like "for: steverubel"), please use "spam:" so that someone can devise a hack to delete all these spam messages, er, "open letters".

tags: steve+rubel, ozgur+alaz, social+spam, open+letter, del.icio.us

Comments

[kosmar]

i agree. i always thought the for: tag only worked for mutual contact, hm. if not, its clearly a hole for recommendationspam.

[alan herrell - the head lemur]

Actually I have it under Moron Marketing
http://theheadlemur.typepad.com/ravinglunacy/2006/07/reinventing_the.html

[Stowe Boyd]

Alan - Dead on.