spam?

From: david goldenberg
Subject: Electric Car Record?
To: [email protected]
Date: Fri, 6 May 2005 13:54:38 -0700
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2627

Hey Chris,

Thought you might like this piece about cars for My Quiet Life. It’s
from Gelf Magazine, where I work.

What’s the land-speed record for electric vehicles? It depends on whom
you ask, writes Carl Bialik. Yesterday, a British electric-vehicle team
landed a story in the Associated Press heralding their quest to break
the 300 mph barrier. But a group of students at Ohio State have already
accomplished that feat-are the British attempting to cash in on a
technicality?
http://www.gelfmagazine.com/mt/archives/fast_and_loose.html

At first I thought it was legitimate but on closer inspection I think it’s fairly obvious that this message was a template and probably sent to many people – namely that “cars” is a defined category on my blog, and “My Quiet Life” is the official name, which someone is unlikely to use so literally. The template is probably “Thought you might like this piece about %%CATEGORYNAME%% for %%BLOGNAME%%. It’s from Gelf Magazine, where I work.”

Presumably if this person reads my blog often enough to know that I actually focus on car talk enough to send me a link, he will also read this and clear up the confusion, but I think this was just a distributed message. Anyone else get this?

This poses an interesting dilemma for me as a crusading anti-spammer. The article he sent me is actually pretty interesting, but do I condone this by linking to it? (Obviously I sorta have, in posting this, but hey.) Is this spam, or is this a perfectly legitimate way to distribute content to interested parties? A difficult question.