Blogs as conversations? Yeah, right.

Category: blogging

Some folks like to see blogs as a way to have conversations. Blogs reference other blogs; people add comments; trackbacks form back-links to references; all is happy, sweetness, and light.

Twaddle. What we have right now, is a messy prototype. Comments are too prone to comment spam, most people find it hard to understand the concept of trackbacks, and the whole thing is just too damned difficult.

If feeds and aggregation really are going to replace email, it needs to be a whole lot easier to have conversations. Today, conceptualizing, navigating, and adding to a thread is just too hard for 95% of users. (No I didn't do a statistically-clean survey to come up with that number. So sue me.)

So how do we make this a friction-free process? Glenn Reid has had an interesting idea; he's still thinking about it.

Gosling is a potty-mouth

Category: swearing, DVD

Link: ZDNet Australia

Buried in a mildly-interesting piece about how Microsoft may have screwed Sun over with their recent legal settlement, Brendon Chase throws in this nugget:

"Gosling [used] adjectives traditionally reserved for the act of procreation to describe DVD encryption."

He's right, you know. (/me fires up DVDShrink...)

Spam volumes redux

Category: spam

Several anti-spam companies talk about spam volumes in terms of a percentage of all inbound mail. Outsourced anti-spam services such as BlackSpider and Postini are currently quoting spam volumes in the 70%-85% range, having steadily grown over the last two+ years.

That's nice, but it's actually hard to grasp what that means in absolute terms. All you maths graduates will immediately realise that spam percentage can never grow to 100% (unless people stop sending legitimate email of course).

For the rest of, who struggle to visualize asymptotes and such, here are a couple of graphs to illustrate this...

The first graph shows the usual percentage figures that we're used to seeing from anti-spam companies. It plots the growth of spam since the start of 2003. I've smoothed the peaks and troughs for clarity. As some vendors have recently implied, it looks like the volume of spam is starting to level off.

Now look at the second graph. It shows the same data, but expressed as the number of spam messages. Now we see that, far from slowing down, the volume of spam continues to grow at a fairly consistent rate. In fact, I calculated these numbers assuming that the level of legitimate email stayed static, which would probably understate the spam growth. (Note there's deliberately no Y-axis scale on this graph: the shape is what's important, not the scale.)

So tell me again... is spam levelling off?

Trivia from the MIT Spam Conference

Category: spam

MIT held its 2005 Spam Conference last week. Some interesting talks, with new ideas. Some mad-sounding, academic ideas that would never work in the real world. Unfortunately some boring, unoriginal, or marketing-driven ones too.

Some interesting trivia:

• There are 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to mis-spell \/¡äğŗă
• About 5% of web traffic appears to be spammers harvesting email addresses
• On average, spammers take about 10 days to send spam to a newly-harvested address
• At one point, an audience member asked, "If the opposite of Spam is Ham, what's the opposite of Phish?" Quick as a flash, the answer came back... "Phowl."

I'm back

Can you guess where I've been for the last couple of weeks? Did you miss me?

I particularly enjoyed the Pitons (and, no, I'm not talking about the mountains).

Weather wasn't brilliant to begin with—it seems like the weather's been "odd" all over the world since the tsunami.

Mountains of email and such to catch up with, naturally. Please ping me again if I seem to be ignoring you.

More pictures here.