Email Can Be Extremely Irritating

There are some extremely irritating things that have become an accepted part of life for virtually all webmasters and as the website administrator of the Wandle industrial museum, I promise you these things evan happen to the small local website’s.

One such constant annoyance is the stream of illogical emails demanding links.

Email is an interesting medium, part of the "problem" is that computer's don't smell; ie the knowledge gained from or created with a computer has no texture, or context. It's there and then it's gone, email disappears then seemingly arrives instantly and it is this that makes it emotionally cheap at the source.

This is written communication; where you can't undo an offensive message and there's a human being at the other end, reading your email and reacting to it with human feelings who will most likely misunderstand any ambiguities, and who can then archive and/or forward it.

Here is an example of a link request I recently recived from an irrelevant website; Note that email is not necessarily subject to protection by intellectual property rights.

Even if this were not the case, there are exceptions that allow use of copyrighted works of others because they are not considered copying. In this case, I would sight fair use doctrine, which allows lawful reproduction of others' work without permission in areas where it is felt that some more important social principles would be violated otherwise:

----- Original Message -----
From: irrelevant Media Productions
To: webbo@webbo.info
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2005 03:51 AM
Subject: Reciprocal links

Hello Michael;

I have put a link to your site at
www.irrelevantwebsite.com/links.html

You can have a look and tell me if everything is ok.

Please put the following beside the link back to us at www.irrelevantwebsite.com/

A website detailing community and business information for the Lakeshore, Mimico, New Toronto, and Long Branch.

Thanks again and good luck to you and your site!

Creed

And here is my reply:
Dear Backyard Media Productions;

Re: Your email of 23 June 2005.

Thank you for taking an interest in The Wandle Industrial Museum.

Viz Your request for a link to "www.irrelevantwebsite.com".

PageRank for www.irrelevantwebsite.com/ = 3 of 10. As a general policy, PageRank is NEVER a consideration, I don’t care about PageRank.

I go by the quality of the website links pages, which in your case is a hodgepodge of Canadian sites and a lode of irrelevant sites that share nothing in common with yours, except the fact that there webmaster’s were stupid enough to link back to you!

Unlike you amoral commercial newbees, I gladly link to sites without the need for reciprocation in order to provide my users with on topic resources.

That’s why people link to us, because of our good content and relevant links; NOT because we drop everything for the rude emails from weird / ridiculous little morons around the world who demand reciprocal links from any and every webmaster that put in the hard work and time needed to get good search engine ranking.

Your "website" is nothing to do with the subject matter of ours, ie the Wandle valley (in the UK) or industrial history, why would we seriously consider some pokey little area named after a rode in the backwaters of Canada as an topic resource.

There is nothing in Canada that would even be of the remotest interest to our readers, so I will not be providing a link to your crappy little commercial blog.

With kind regards,

Michael Hart
(aka K0111371)

© I am the website administrator of the Wandle industrial museum (http://www.wandle.org). Established in 1983 by local people to ensure that the history of the valley was no longer neglected but enhanced awareness its heritage for the use and benefits of the community.