Nov. 5th, 2005 @ 11:00AM
Well, this just might be the end of an era ...

Over the past week, Google has let the hammer fall on your Spambox, tagged our work as a Suspected Spam Terrorist, and slapped the blog with manditory CAPTCHA graphic challenges that thwart the very essence of a real-time information distillery.

It's an honor, really. If you think about it. For those who say Art is an imitation of life, Spambox imitated the media of spam until it became indistinguishable from the very life it portrayed; it's as if van Gogh's flowers were to start losing petals and someone had to show up once a day to sweep the dried discards from the table.

Jests aside, Google says this is how they must combat "Spam Blogs", listed in the WikiPedia as "splogs" because some (unspecified) celebrity said so. The blogspot captcha annotation link to "why me, why now" popped up a page asking for an email address and another CAPTCHA challenge, promising to summon a real human to "review your blog" as a court of appeal, so while the robots may have been fooled by Spambox, it remains to be seen whether the humans will agree.

Then again, maybe it's time to roll it up, been done, been there, you can even get the T-Shirt if you so wish, or download a spam ringtone. That's pretty now, really; all that's missing is the DVD! And Spambox has seen imitators, new crops of auto-posted mash-ups of random or selected websites, hand-crafted posts of mashup spam mail, even the use of the Spambox method in the construction of new filter-frustrating spam mail itself! Although it may have gone unnoticed in Milan this year, you and I know Spambox has also been the founding precident of a whole new genre of generative art built up from the process musics rooted in Mozart carried right up through into the twentieth-century monographs of spam mail and captcha and the fierce emotional reaction of the Internet vox populi to both, and that's quite a trip really.