Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Dorothea Salo started a conversation late last year that was picked up by Walt Crawford and others about receiving unsolicited “PR spam” with the expectation that the content of the message will be blogged about. In a related matter, I got my first example today of someone scraping DLTJ to send me junk mail through the U.S. postal service.

Now there are several weird things about this. First, the address is indeed my place of work, but DLTJ is not an OhioLINK communication channel. (In other words, “the views expressed here are those of the author and not the author’s employer…yadda, yadda, yadda.”) The only place the address appears, that I know about, is on my contact page on DLTJ. And if one should happen to go to that page to scrape the address, one would see that this blog is written by a guy named Peter Murray, not someone named Tom Wilson. I can only guess that the Tom Wilson in question is the one that is the Associate Dean for Library Technology at the University of Alabama Libraries and former LITA president, but if not that Tom Wilson has a list of other Tom Wilsons it might be.

It will be interesting to see if name/address combination gets sold to someone else; I’ll certainly know by the characteristics of the junk mail received. I guess I’ll also have to expand the disclaimer to say: “the views expressed here are those of the author and not the author’s employer or of Tom Wilson….”