Recently I had occasion to send a card to a bunch of people on my Friends list. To my dismay, something I thought was a given appears not to be the case: You can't send something to multiple Friends at the same time.

What the hell? I know I could create a Group, put all my Friends in it, and send an announcement out with something attached, but why go to all that trouble? All I want to do is spam everyone with wolfie love! Maybe not 'spam', exactly, just ... you know ... notspam. I want to notspam everyone with wolfie love. Why can't I do it? Why? Wwwwwhhhyyyyyyy?

Linden Lab, if you're reading this, please: offer us the option of notspamming our friends. It's the Right Thing To Do. If you don't, I will cry my tiny, primmy little eyes out. And you don't wanna know what wet wolf fur smells like.

I'm not sure quite why - whether it was part of a broader messaging campaign or what, precisely, but I got a relatively incomprehensible IM just after 4am local time. I say relatively because speaking French isn't among my strong suits. Manifestly, I got it when I woke up, in my email.

Well, we all know what to do when we have irregular verbs in another language tossed at us, right? Yep! Off to Google Language Tools. Copy....paste...

A post on the Linden Blog refers to a mass spam attack of advertising last night. No-one is mentioning any names, so it isn't clear whether this was a griefer spam attack or PR gone mad.

The message is clear for anyone who has talked to groups of SLers...spam isn't welcome at any time. Spam chat can be muted, spam notecards can be rejected, but spam particle effects are more difficult to deal with, unless you turn off particles altogether.

Different but sometimes as annoying, is a large increase in spam petitions, which I think are very ill-judged. A notecard arrives without warning with a protest statement on it and the signatures of a dozen or so people signing up to it, wth an exhortation to sign it and send it on to everyone in your friends list.

I am not about to do that. Apart from anything else, the petition doesn't have to go through many people before it becomes a chaotic mess of notecards, all with different people's signatures on each one. What is the point of that? Even if petitions are effective in getting people to change their behaviour, or Linden Lab to change the rules, there is no way in the world of tracking down the notecards and organising them into a cohesive whole anyway.

Far better in my opinion, is to put a blog page up and ask your friends to comment on it or add their name to a poll.

First collect all the worlds underpants, then ..., then Profit! This ingenious plan was the work of the underpants gnomes in an episode of South Park. This plan had a much better chance of making you money than one I was offered in Second Life today. Victor Li, I don't know him maybe he is great, sent me an invitation to join his group. To join I just had to pay L$10 and then get 5 of my friends to do the same thing. These five friends should either be not very close friends or actually enemies who don't realize it yet. That part wasn't in the instructions, but SERIOUSLY I have about as much chance getting my friends to do that as I do of having them prostitute their currently SPAM free email addresses, so that I can get a free Xbox 360 or Mac Mini mailed to them in 6 to 8 months.

So here is the cool part, the more people who join the more money made and all proceeds will be split equally among list members! Now I can't find my calculator anywhere, but L$10 per person divided by the number of people is L$10 each. So, save your money and time and avoid this. Is anyone else getting this type of invitation? Are these things even legal? What I fear the most is that this is the beginning of Second Life Junk Mail, or Second SPAM if you will.

I wrote some time ago that Text 100, the PR company which has moved into SL, had better get to know the community they have joined if they want to make a success of their business here. Boy are they off to a bad start with me.

They sent me a spam email to my private email address yesterday. Now, obviously, on your behalf I receive a lot of email. I am sent notification when someone makes a comment on a post, I receive tips from SL residents about stories I might like to cover. Those things are labelled with SL insider and I can recognise them instantly. What I don't expect to get is company promotional emails or SL Insider tips sent as spam to my own email.