Some of these are clearly an attempt to get his name to show up on Google as an authority to promote his IT consultancy. The discussions about him will probably rank higher on Google and thus backfire on him.

Besides, if I’d submitted it, Jay would have been on hand to point out that Cemper’s actions don’t classify him as a comment spammer and is out of the domain of the comment spam clearinghouse. For that we have Jay to thank for his tremendous efforts keeping the blacklist clean even with tons of spam submissions.

My idea of the comment spam clearinghouse’s function was that it was there to prevent people who try to self-promote, gain exposure for, and seek backlinks for their websites on blogs without contributing to the “discussion” – an abuse of TrackBack. That is my judgement of what Cemper was doing there as well, and for a moment there that made him (or rather his URL) eligible for submission to the clearinghouse to me. Of course, that is a true misjudgement on my part.

I did not think to abuse the clearinghouse and never intend to. Quoting you (Camilo):

the idea of the clearinghouse used as a way to silence anyone with whom we disagree

I fully agree with that and I do not appreciate being adjudged to be attempting to use the clearinghouse to silence Cemper, even though I disagree with his idea of when a TrackBack ping should be sent.

Joanne: I agree with you on a possible need for a counterpart to the clearinghouse, although I’m not certain of how rampant TrackBack abuse is. Perhaps this is just the beginning of a wave of trackback abuse as you’ve said. When the time comes, we have Jay’s pioneering efforts to guide us.

I, too, received the same trackback ping on an entry for my own blog about Jay’s software from Christoph. I ignored it and deleted it once I’d established there was no direct quote of my own site: it seemed a rather bald-faced attempt at self-promotion to me. But I am glad you have responded in this manner. This is, perhaps, the beginning of a wave of trackback abuse. And it’s best that we nip it in the bud.

We’ve already had one trackback “misunderstnding” with the guy who runs ClarkBot. It was resolved peacefully, as it should be.

Cemper has sent quite a few pings my way as well. The first few, I went over to see what it was about and was confunded. His post seemingly had nothing to do with the post on my site. After a few of those, I just simply started ignoring them.

That is, of course, the result over over-Trackbacking: you lose credibility and people ignore you.

In my opinion, it isn’t spamming (in the Comment Spam Cleaqringhouse sense), but it is rather annoying. And if it continues, I can bet that certain people will elect to add people who do this to their own blacklist installation.

But this is not the domain of the Comment Spam Clearinghouse. Cemper is a blogger and a prolific one at that. He is not a bottom-feeder like the porn and pills spammer. He simply needs to understand that trackbacks are conversation. If you “talk” too much, people will avoid you at the party…