Tuesday, September 30, 2008

LinkedIn: Spamming in disguise?

I'm member of linkedIn for quite awhile now. Here's a situation that just happened to me and it shows one of the perverse aspect of linkedIn and how it is used to simply spam people and disguise this as building networking.


Few days ago I got an email from one of my first line members on linkedIn. His name is Octavio Pitaluga and his profile present him as "king of the world" with mastery in about everything. So this chap spams me for his new business and that I should go visit his website and arrange a demo session and bla.bla.bla.

I send a response asking to stop receiving this kind of spam and here's the rude answer I got from him:

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....pls break the connection with me on LinkedIN and any other online social network
If we can not communicate, there is no reason to keep any connection at all.
Kindly avoid replying to this msg. Just do what I am asking for right away.
File closed.

Octavio Pitaluga
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So you see, on one hand I am interested to network with people and get to know other interesting people but I certainly don't consider that this give permission to all my contact to start spamming and start sending me emails about their latest product or promotion. Isn't that perverting the idea of networking? Isn't that simply a way not to abide to permission marketing? and finally shouldn't these "super promoter" be banned?
So what's your opinion about this?

Friday, September 19, 2008

Time to do nothing?


If you have plenty of cash, big positions in world-dominating businesses, and a cache of physical gold to protect your purchasing power... then doing nothing is probably the way to go right now.