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13 Comments

One thought as to what might motivate this line of queries: Often college professors will plug in seemingly random sections of text from students' essays in order to seek out plagiarism. Especially in the case of Comp I and Comp II students, these can sometimes contain quite personal details.

August 10, 2006 12:16 PM

This seems to be segments of, one side of, an IM session.

Like AOL search was taking priority away from AIM and filling it's query box with the end of the message.

August 10, 2006 12:38 PM

Ive done this before. I am a hopeless nerd of postmodern "slipstream" poetry and poetic forms and This type of writing/querying is a hilarous crossroad between expression and absolutely useless computing processes. Im just happy the tenuous genre is getting its due...

August 10, 2006 12:39 PM

The AIM theory is a good one but it seems to me that someone using IM would make more of an effort to be coherent.

August 10, 2006 1:03 PM

They sound like song lyrics to me -- at least, I've typed phrases like this when I was looking for song lyrics. Though I googled a few of these, and no songs came up.

August 10, 2006 1:43 PM

It seems they found some sort of release in just pounding out their anger in the search box rather than writing it in a diary or something.

August 10, 2006 3:08 PM

And now the segments googled by John Doe will show up on some google search list, and the dance will begin again.

Meanwhile, in the real world...

August 10, 2006 3:54 PM

The searches remind me of picture titles from explodingdog.com

August 10, 2006 4:08 PM

I highly doubt someone was actually sitting at their desk typing this stuff in. I've parsed out only the date/time stamps, and they are entered methodically every 30 seconds or so, give or take, for continuous stretches lasting several hours.

At least, I seriously hope someone wasn't sitting there the whole time! They'd likely have bedsores, blood clots, yeesh. Curious... maybe we're looking at a recovering patient in a hospital bed with a laptop.

And, although it appears to be automated, many lines do directly relate to those that follow, suggesting intelligence.

Perhaps we're looking at a creative individual who has setup a program to automatically post his poetry to the search box?

Another theory... we're looking at an infected spam "zombie" machine, which is pulling 4-5 seperate bits of text from emails, etc. and posting them to a search engine looking for some kind of result.

Very fascinating.

August 10, 2006 5:52 PM

I agree that it looks like snippits of one side of an IM conversation. Maybe she had malware that took her keystrokes and every few seconds submitted them via her browser? I see in this text the story of a middle aged black woman who was first married in 1977. She may live in Dayton Ohio, and has ongoing issues with money. She is divorced and has two sons, and is a spiritual person by nature. She takes comfort in talking to one of the people she chats with online, and another - likely an ex - she despises and guiltily indulges in the blunt raw power of fighting in IM text. The main men in her life are Joe (she thinks he cheats on her), Tyrell, Rick, and there's someone named Trinity too. She loves to shop, and hated to witness some people she knew stealing clothes from Wal-Mart. Yes, this woman has a story, even if it is in 2 to 8 word chunks :-)

August 10, 2006 10:37 PM

Thanks echo for the "slipstream poetry" comment, now I have the perfect words to describe that crazy thing I do. I had the same thought as Morgan and Rea. This is clearly automated. What it reminded me of, was one of those scripts written to fool the tracking software that pays you to surf (examples: http://amby.com/tools/get-paid.html). This reminds me more of weird spam, as if the text is being compiled from multiple sources (Poetry, chat-logs, etc.) by anti-anti-spam technology (spam text auto-constructed to slip through spam-detectors that are looking for text that sounds too robotic). The script only has to be good enough to fool the tracking software, for example it looks like it logs-off for a couple hours every day to "sleep", but upon human inspection, the "search every 30-120 seconds" in the timestamps gives it away for the script that it is. It probably shuts off when the real user sits down to use the net. Like 2006-05-09 13:28:28 when they checked out some midget porn. The script kicked back in about 6 minutes later at 13:34:19.

August 11, 2006 11:31 PM

Rea: Well done! I drew all the same conclusions. You did however miss out that she once worked for General Motors, but is now retired. She refers to Rick as being a "good CEO". Interestingly enough the current CEO of GM is Rick Wagoner.

I agree this looks like one side of an IM discussion. But not with a single person. It looks to me as if the user is chatting to at least 2 at the one time. In most sessions anyway.

There are some really creepy lines in this. She constantly refers to what seems to be embezzelment of funds, and jail time served by "JT". There is also numerous references to killing, and someone at one stage trying to kill her.

I dunno, I get the feeling this person is suffereing from dementia and possibly a multiple personality disorder. I'm not so sure it's an IM session, but maybe she thinks it is. Interesting all the same.

August 13, 2006 5:42 PM

Oh, man, I'm not the only one taken by user 23187425? I was going to post something about this on my blog but I've mostly been working on redesigning the site.

Anyway, I want to do some kind of writing project based on this stuff. I'm thinking I might write a series of monologues out of some of the more "poetic" entries. There aren't any quite like 23187425 that I've found but I think there's fun to be had.

I'd write poems since I already write spoetry, but this is the sort of thing I'd like to hear someone actually saying.

Of course, if I do write poems, I wonder what to call it. Spam poetry is called "spoetry" so what would log poetry be? Plog?

August 14, 2006 3:30 PM