Worst. Sales. Attempt. Ever.

I was going to post the e-mail I received as an image, but didn't want to identify the sender, lest he get bombarded with hate mail. Suffice it to say that you don't attract interest from media buyers by doing the following:

• Sending a pitch e-mail to the general mailbox from our website, unsolicited
• Addressing e-mails to "Dear Media Buyer,"
• With the cut and paste brackets plainly visible
• Sending massive attachments (nine PDF files and a Word document totaling over 6 MB)
• And the Word document has grammatical errors

I was nice and simply ignored it, although I suspect my partner Eric may cyberslap the guy for sending heavy attachments without warning. Serves him right.

Gee, That Was Helpful

Following the advice of another blogger frustrated with comment spam, I took five minutes to rename the comment submission script in Movable Type and make the necessary adjustments in the configuration script. It took the comment spam bots about 5 minutes to find out the new name of the script and begin posting crap to my site again. Gee, that worked like...not at all.

There's a hack called scode that enables requiring users to re-type a security code in order to post, but it's a pain in the ass to install. Maybe over the weekend.

London Terror Bombings - A Reaction

I'm so shaken up by the latest round of terrorist attacks, and there's so much emotion... The best counter-terrorism intelligence and operations can't keep us 100 percent safe, and I'm mindful of keeping expectations real, but for there to be an Al-Qaeda cell operating in the London area that was able to pull off such a coordinated attack - that's just scary as hell.

I'm exceptionally mad, too. Although my expectations are not of 100 percent safety, I'm somewhat angered that our administration still thinks that the war in Iraq is keeping us safe - you know, the whole "fight terrorists abroad so we don't have to fight them here" thing. If we've made so much progress against Al-Qaeda, how can there be a cell of significant size and capability operating in London? We should be re-evaluating tactics.

Mostly, though, I'm saddened by the loss of life. My prayers go out to those affected. It's just terrible, and I'm still shocked that there are people in the world willing to do this to make a political point.

Sources: It's Rove

Editor and Publisher says an MSNBC analyst believes Karl Rove to be Matt Cooper's source. Here's a follow-up article.

Explain to me how this isn't plastered all over front pages and dominating political talk show agendas.

Oh, I know why. It's because all of a sudden, what Rove and Cooper discussed is "unclear."

They have the notes. They have the e-mails. Editors should know as a matter of procedure the identity of the unnamed source and what information is relayed. Something in those documents, between the notes and the correspondence between Cooper and his editors, should definitively identify the source and the information that was relayed. If not, some editors at Time, Inc. took Cooper at his word and probably broke all sorts of procedural rules over there.

When I wrote for my college paper, I did a big investigative piece on drug sources in the community. I spoke directly to a major drug supplier who was doing all sorts of other illegal things. In order to write the story, I had to ensure his anonymity. I wouldn't divulge the source, but I also had to ensure that at least one other editor at the paper knew who the anonymous source was, so she could back me in the case that someone accused me of simply making shit up. As I understood it at the time, having one's editor know the identity of an anonymous source is pretty much the status quo in newsrooms for this type of story.

So it's very, very likely that confidential correspondence exists between Cooper and at least one of his editors that discloses the identity of the anonymous source, and what information he was responsible for relaying.

If that correspondence exists, why don't we know the identity of the source with any degree of certainty?