Twisted sprint
Andrew and I are flying to Hobart this evening for the inaugural Australian Twisted sprint. Sprinting will be competing with tourism a bit, but I’m looking forward to both, despite this being another weekend in which I am not sponging around on my beanbag.
Google spam, round 3
Seems Google’s business development people (or their cyborg stand ins — the mail has a reference number, so it’s possible it’s all handled by The Machine) were concerned I didn’t reply to their last mail. So, they sent a followup.
I sent the following in reply:
On Wed, Mar 30, 2005, Google Crawl Coverage wrote: > Greetings, > > I just wanted to follow up with you to confirm that you had received my > previous email. If you are not the right person for this, perhaps you > could forward it to the appropriate person within your firm. > > Thanks. I look forward to hearing from you. I received it. I've deliberately chosen to have a number of domains I run, including this, excluded from Google's index (and from many other robot crawls). It's not a site designed to be useful to casual viewers, and it isn't a commercial site so attracting extra visitors has no commercial advantage to me. I'm concerned about this particular business development scheme of Google's -- what if every search engine sent me repeated queries about my robots.txt file? That would be very time consuming to deal with. I know the implications of its contents and deliberately chose them. -Mary
And hopefully that’s the first and last time I’ll reply to spam. Invoking the categorical imperative in that reply was silly anyway: much of the idea of a business plan is to do something that no one else is doing and hope that it doesn’t become a universal law.