Top dog, Ted Rheingold, emailed the other day pointing out a new position, Community Manager, they have going over at Dogster. Then today Seth Godin posted this thought about jobs of the future: Online Community Organizer, and it seemed to be a sign that I should help Ted out...so if you are in the market, or know someone who would rock a job like this then check it out.
While we're thinking about online community why not revisit Ted's seminal presentation, The State, Future and Business of Passion-Centric Online Communities.
Normally I just flag all the spam comments that Akismet doesn't automatically delete and dump them, but this one caught my attention recently because it wasn't linking to some viagra site, but rather to Netscape.com...
It turns out that this user on Netscape, 'eiradys', is posting links to articles covering a bunch of topics like How to Buy Wholesale Jewelery, Hotels in New York, California Real Estate, Chili Recipes and How to get a bad credit loan...and all these stories include an open link to the article as you can see here:
Of course this isn't in itself a bad thing, I mean even if they are spammy articles who am I to pass editorial judgement. However, what makes it 100% clear that these are not articles posted for the benefit of anyone but the Googlebot is the way the spammer then completes the loop by spamming blogs with comments linking back to their user pages on Netscape, and in this way aims to boost the indexation and juice of those Netscape pages...and in turn his (or her) own article pages. Sneaky.
They also seem to have taken care to avoid detection by sprinkling their account with legit posts to articles on CNN and others, as well as building up what appears to be a fairly legit network of 'friends'. There's a low level of cross posting on all those 'spammy' articles so I would guess that these accounts are all controlled by the one person.
I wonder what Jason Calacanis would make of this?