Many thanks to Alex Salkever for pointing me to the blog of Panos Ipeirotis, a New York University business school professor who developed a methodology for studying outsourcing by spammers who use Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for small computer jobs. Think tiny. Sign up for an AOL account, get two cents, etc.
But the professor and his colleagues found many kinds of tasks that were spam-related, and set about designing a methodology to measure just how prevalent they are, which is explained at length.
The bottom line: 40% of the tasks listed by new requesters were rated as spam, and nearly one-third of new users only posted spam-related tasks.
So it seems my little flurry of spam comments regarding Security One, described here yesterday, were just a small indicator of this problem.
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the so-called spam industry is huge, and for people who need money, you sort of take what you can get, if you know what i mean. it sucks, but especially in a down economy, one’s choices can be rather limited. sometimes, it’s almost literally: 1) do i get a job standing on a corner holding a sign, 2) do i go work for a gay porn company (if i’m even lucky enough to be offered the job), 3) do i use my computer skills for an “seo” (aka spam) job?