Can spam be art?
Posted by: sulz on: June 27, 2007
Raincoaster posted this in the WordPress.com forums about SpamPaint which turns spam into art! How cool is that, seriously?
Let’s assume a spam bot comes to a weblog and leaves a comment. Let’s also assume this blog is using the Akismet plugin to recognise spam. Now that the blog software knows it has been spammed it will either delete the comment spam or, if we are lucky and the blog is contributing to SpamPaint, it will be automatically sent to the SpamPaint engine.
After receiving the comment SpamPaint will analyse it. For example: comment spam nearly almost includes links to websites (after all, the intention of comment spam is to promote websites) so SpamPaint visits these sites and grabs the colors and some images. SpamPaint also checks from which country the spammer is and shows this in the generated graphics. That’s just two of many steps.
See past archives of SpamPaint here.
ps. Thought the spampaint art featured in this post would look really good as t-shirt prints! Hmm…
6 Responses to "Can spam be art?"
1 | raincoaster
I Feedbacked it, yew betcha. I hope we get that; it would be a highly cool feature.
Incidentally, I got the idea from Darren Barefoot.
sulz: just feedbacked. as said in the wp forum thread, it would be even cooler if the bots could make a spam paint out of the spam solely from self’s blog, but these are really really nice anyway.
2 | ish
Interesting! It’s a great thing to do. And I thought spam was always ugly.
By the way, congratulations to you. Neither of us won the t-shirts or the WP credits. The same guy won the 2 prizes and another one won the other one. Ah whatever. I won’t be so enthusiastic next time around now that I’ve lost once.
sulz: if you like that spam thing, support it by making a request via feedback, and maybe we could have this feature in our blogs!
why do self deserve the congrats for? it’s 2 different guys, but almost similar names. 
don’t give up! have won a book from a blog contest before. this is coming from a girl who almost never wins anything - like newspaper contests, forget it.
3 | ish
Ah well, the congratulations was just meant to be irony. And yea, it’s two different guys, I realized that later. I haven’t won anything in any competition ever. But as they say, never stop trying!
sulz: ah… am a little slow on jokes on the blogosphere actually… and in real life too… anyway yes you don’t stop trying. you’re going to win a bacardi someday.
Hey, thanks for the comments, by the way, what does ‘potong stim’ mean?? I tried googling the words, but i get a variety of meanings, am really confused!!
btw, sorry for spamming your post on spam with this comment!
sulz: haha, but you weren’t meant to know! it just means am a little disappointed, ‘cos your story would have been really nice if it were real, you know? 
(not that it isn’t, of course!)
no worries, comments like this aren’t spam in self’s opinion.
5 | Micahville » Blog Archive » The Strangest Things.
[...] [Blog] Spam Art [...]
6 | Edseverripit
Maybe too garish and bright for my taste, but that’s what the ravers at Rise are all for! Well, apart from Strawberry Shortcake.
sulz: well, as they say beauty is in the eye of the beer holder.
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