Priceless: Cornell University Library Facilitates Spam
I just received the most beautiful spam comment on one of my other blogs:
Since the Cornell Library Resolver uses an http Location header to send user-agents from one of its pURLs to a real URL, a spammer just has to sign up with the library for an account through its unsecured interface and begin spamming away. Backlinks from a .edu site definitely help, I’ll tell you. So, what happens if you click on of these links? You get this:
Thanks, Cornell! All I want for christmas is my load of spam, my load of spam…
Cornell University on Wikipedia
The CU Wikipedia talk page was updated today! Xtreambar wrote, “The article will go up on the mainpage in the next 24 hours. I encourage people to read over the page again. Though little has changed in the past couple months, a one-over wouldn’t hurt.” Indeed, check it out! We’re on the front page of Wikipedia for the article Cornell University:
I haven’t written anything on Wikipedia in a while, but I still log in to check up on my watched pages, and found this pleasant surprise. Should be good PR for the school!
The New Cornell Blogs
You’ve probably noticed that Cornell’s now hosting student blogging projects. They’re running (for the technically inclined) an out-of-date version of Wordpress 2.0.3, using some minor customization, and without mod_rewrite turned on. It’s a bit sad that they’re trying to reinvent and rebrand the services that Wordpress.com already offers, but for a CU hosted blogging project, it’s probably a good start.
The Prez is quite critical of the content of the blogs, most of which deals with verbose, mundane details of each of the official bloggers’ lives. Caroline responds and says, “If you want a little dose of what it means to be a regular old student here, I hope that my blog will fit the bill.” While there is at least dialog going on now in the online Cornell blogging community, what Cornell actually did was create a migration program for personal online journals.
Now, instead of publishing the mindless details of their private lives for the consumption of their close friends on livejournal, Cornell University has nominated them public spokesmen to share their private lives with everyone! Reading over their last forty entries, the content seems to be about on the same level of insight and quality as the median of Livejournal, Myspace, and Xanga. Of all the posts I encountered, there was only one I approved of in any way, and only insofar as it at least included pictures to go along with the personal flow-of-life writing: Collegetown is so far away.
The Cornell Daily Sun (currently dying on the web), wrote a piece about this. In it, some editor wrote:
The applicant pool was limited only to students who already promote the Big Red on a regular basis. Only those who serve as campus tour guides, members of the Cornell Tradition or Undergraduate Admissions employees were eligible for the job.
The short of it is that the Cornell University Student Blogging Project is just a watered down PR machine written by a gang of unfocused novice bloggers.
