A new kind of Spamming: artificial attention spamming
Article updated (original date: 05-2007). In the attention economy context, a common question is: “How attract the people’s attention to my web page when I’m new and I don’t have any reputation?” . The classical marketing way is to spam people with emails. Another solution is to pay falsely attention to people to have their attention due to a psychological reciprocity factor and create a new kind of spamming: “attention” spamming.
Social reciprocity mechanism
I’m sure you know the simple social mechanism used in websites like Viadeo, linkedin or in the Mybloglog widget (check out it at the bottom-left side of my blog with the last mybloglog members who have read my blog): if a user A visits a user B’s profile/blog, this one will know it. Because a user is always curious to know who is interested by him, he will certainly go to the visitor’s page. So B will certainly go to visit the user A’s page. This very simple feature has a real social impact on the people behavior and can be hijacked for our purpose
How paying falsely attention to thousand of people?
Now imagine you create a program taking your identity in a community using this feature, and that visits all the members’ blogs. For each member, instead of sending an email to him/her as a classical marketing way, the program would take your identity, letting a trace of your visit on their blogs , simulating some attention for this person. In doing that you have artificially increased your attention for the others’ point of view, and visiting thousand of people’s blog using the social feature in their blogs is just enough to attract a lot of attention to you.
Experimentation & results
I tried and… it works well 
. My small program explored the mybloglog network (just the 100 first people according to their degrees in my network) and went to their blogs. I don’t remember the exact results but a lot of people went to my blog to see who I was. (Maybe people who are reading this post have been attracted by my bot). Of course you have to target the long tail of people who don’t have a lot of visitors.
My goal is not to encourage this kind of spamming, nor to manipulate people (i.e. the people think they decide themselft to visit my blog even if it’s not really the case, because of this psychological pitfall). It was just an experimentation 
.
May 28th, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Indeed it worked for me
I think MyBlogLog will find a way to reduce this “side effect” if this issue becomes too annoying…
A way could be to limit the number of visits per minute (I don’t think that more than 10 blogs visited per minute is realistic for a human…)
May 28th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Nevertheless, if MyBlogLog did not blocked this, there is a reason… it raises up the trafic on MyBlogLog…
May 28th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
MyBlogLog’s goal is not more traffic, its connections between people. Presence spamming sucks, and enough people start doing it we’ll have to prioritize fixing it above cool new features.
August 31st, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Very interesting phenomenon! I suppose the same could be done for all social networks. This may eventually start a series of presence wars in sites such as Facebook, until a solution is discovered to prvent it.
July 21st, 2008 at 5:59 pm
[...] of Rohit’s commenters, Nicolas Maisonneuve, had a cautionary post on this sort of thing which he termed “Artificial Attention [...]
February 13th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
Just as google buzz came about I added a few people by mistake.. then I removed them. But within a few minutes those guys started following me! (who are you guys?!)
March 6th, 2012 at 6:09 pm
Hallo nico.maisonneuve.free.fr Team! Im neuen zu dieser Web-Seite, und ich wollte Hallo sagen. Dies kann ein großer Web-Site und im froh, dass ich verbunden werden. Neu auf diesem Blog Dank für die Begrüßung. Ich kam gerade um diese wunderbare Blog und wollte mich auf jeden einzuführen. Das ist wirklich wie eine ausgezeichnete Internet-Seite.
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May 13th, 2012 at 4:31 pm
I am just getting started on the Internet. I am retired now. There are a lot of topics on the Internet and I am reading on many of those and commenting. I think that you have to put some attention on a blog to bring it above the dry and boring verbage that is common, and you have definitely accomplished that. I not only read and comment on the blogs of others but I now have my own blog and my own website. My email and site are included with this post. I think it is ok that I incuded them since there seems to be a place to do that. Hope so anyway. TheVeryBest2You 13 9
May 13th, 2012 at 4:31 pm
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May 14th, 2012 at 3:10 pm
The Internet is new to me, being that I just retired. It seems like there are millions of blogs on the Internet today and the more I read the more I want to comment on them. I don’t understand everything that is in all the blogs that I read, but I like your presentation here in this blog. I am the proud owner of my own website and blog and i get ideas from blogs such as yours. Thank-you. There was a place to include an email and address, so I have done that. Is this acceptable? I hope this is allright. TheVeryBest2You 13 9
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