But for all we know, the person sending the message was handed a list and a template and told to hit send as part of his job, so maybe it’s the parent organization you should expose, and not the person.

I think there are two different situations here.

One is the normal press release/proposed press contact. Yes, I’ve gotten those (still do), quite a few of them over the years. They’re clearly identified as press contacts and suggestions for contacts. I either follow them up, ignore them, or in some cases let the person know that I’m an unlikely prospect. I have no problem with such contacts; they’re a good thing. (There are also suggestions from people who clearly read my stuff; no problem there either.)

The other–and this is what I thought Dorothea was referring to–is the “Hey, buddy, you should be writing about this” email: The email that purports to be (but isn’t) based on personal knowledge of your stuff or personal acquaintance. It’s the “personal” part that’s irritating and, I think, deserves calling out.

Now, if I’m reading Dorothea Salo’s post wrong (and I could be: it’s been an odd and stressful week), then I’m responding to a different situation. I expect to continue to get press contacts and suggestions that are identifiable as such–they’re not friends or acquaintances and don’t pass themselves off as such. No problem. No threat of embarrassment. I write for three continuing publications (not including this blog) and now help guide and prepare copy for an international library resource; I should and do expect such contacts.

What I dislike–and it hasn’t happened often–is the pseudopersonal contact. (Real personal contacts: Always fine. We may not always agree on things, but if you sent me a note suggesting something you think I’d want to know about/look at, I’d regard that as wholly legitimate.)

So here’s the guideline: If you’re trying to pitch something to me and you don’t really know me, don’t pretend you do. It will lower the chances of my paying attention–you’re setting up a barrier by trying to make it personal–and if I think it’s egregious it could result in a post.

Or not. Fact is, life is too short, by and large.

Still, you know, roughly half of the spamments that Spam Karma 2 traps each day are of the “I really love your blog” or “I didn’t understand portions of [inserted post title here] but…” or “Thanks for the expert advice on [inserted post title here}…” — all phony personal responses. I think I’m trying to apply a natural-intelligence version of Spam Karma’s filtering, but for my email contacts. Life is also too short to waste time on pseudocontacts.

As for badges: I don’t do those, any more than I sign up for or support a Blogger’s Code of Conduct. I’m just not interested in telling other people how they should run their blogs.

I guess I’m more shocked that you’ve been a print columnist for so long and apparently never had anyone say to you or send you a “hey, check this out – you might want to write about it” solicitation. Congratulations on flying under the radar and avoiding those, because they’re just as annoying.

Speaking from personal experience, this goes on in the real world *all* the time, and if you plan to keep blogging and start calling these folks out (people who are usually just trying to get some publicity for their work), you will spend all of your time writing about them instead of what you want to write about. If you don’t like it, just delete it.

Rather than focusing on the negative and “shaming” these folks, why not do something more constructive like adding guidelines to your site so that others know you’re not blogging about items from “hype emails.” Do something more than just saying, “Me, too,” and create a badge for bibliobloggers that says something like “Don’t blog the hype.”

Personally, I don’t mind when someone gives me a heads up on something. I use my superspecial librarian powers to evaluate it, rather than blindly discounting it because I don’t know the person, and then I decide for myself whether I want to blog about it or not. If it’s not relevant to my blog or I know I won’t have time to look at it right now, I just delete it. I have the power, not them.

Personally, I send such messages to what I think is a worse fate — I put them in my ‘spam’ folder, which is automatically picked up by a server-side SpamAssassin process that submits the message ‘fingerprints’ to the Razor database and the Distributed Checksum Clearinghouse. That way they will hopefully be stopped for other users as well as serving as a form of punishment for their unsolicited messages.