To quote Robert Burton (1577—1640):
Him that makes shoes goes barefoot himself.
This is known nowadays as the no-self buffs trope:
Strangely often, the magician, witch, wizard, cleric, Evil Sorcerer, Mad Scientist, support class, etc. have the ability to bestow strange and amazing transformations, alterations, powers and enhancements on other people, for whichever reason, but are unable to use this ability to directly benefit themselves.
In my case, the fact that I spend my days dealing with databases, web pages, style sheets, JavaScript and the like, left me highly unmotivated to spend my off-work hours dealing with the same things.
There’s a new service out there called PayPerPost. Basically, you get paid for posting ads in your online journal.
So far, so ho-hum. One thing that makes this one a bit different is that the ads aren’t separated into their own section alongside your postings, like Google AdWords; rather, the postings themselves are the ads. Furthermore, buyers get to dictate the wording of the links.
In addition, the question of disclosure is left entirely open.
A few days ago a web developer in Seattle called Jason Fortuny posted a personal ad to the Seattle Craigslist. He apparently lifted the text from a personal posted to another city’s Craigslist.
The ad was a sexually explicit one, from a submissive woman seeking BDSM sex. Fortuny posted it using the Craigslist e-mail anonymizing option. He then collected the responses—178 or more, with at least 145 photos.
Then he published everything on the web. Every single response, unedited, including all the personal information and photographs that people had sent him.
You’ll find threads about it all over the place if you do a few searches. I’m not going to link to any of it, and I’m not going to give any clues to where the personal information was posted. Go search if you really feel you must know; I don’t feel the need to make the victims’ problems even worse by increasing Fortuny’s pagerank scores.
There are a few things I find interesting about the reaction I’ve seen.