Is this the first ever blog?

NCSA's What's New page for June 1993 [hat tip: Debbie Weil]

Tags: blogs, blogging.

On corporate blogs: HP's Yale Tankus takes me to task

I got email from Yale Tankus, the HP OpenView Veep of Partnerships. I think he objected to my dig at his blog last month, on Computerworld's IT Blogwatch. In a report on HP's latest layoffs, I said:

Yale Tankus—an HP exec with a "blog" that has all the hallmarks of being written by a PR flak...

Let's be clear: my "PR flak" line was not directed at the specific post to which I linked, but as a general dig at "corporate blogs"—a phrase that you could see as a contradiction in terms.

It seems to me that execs. of large corporations who blog need to be extra-extra-careful not to have their writing perceived as PR-ghosted. Naturally, HP has a business aim for blogging; nothing wrong with that. However, it's important for a blog to be participatory. It should also have a distinctive "voice."

As it happens, I am advising several of my clients on these issues at present. It's a new world. I won't aggrandize it by describing it as a "paradigm shift," but traditional PR certainly doesn't have all the answers.

Tags: blogs, blogging, cluetrain, HP, HPQ.

I'm in the NYT (again)

I'm quoted in today's New York Times in a nicely written article by Tom Zeller. He also repeats Craig Cook's hysterical "Red-hot Garden Weasel" quote, which I put in one of last week's Computerworld IT Blogwatch posts.

Categories: spam, Scott Richter, ScottRichter, Richi Jennings, RichiJennings.

It's about Finding New Links

Just an experiment. Nothing to see here, move along...

Spam Quarantines Considered Harmful

You may have heard me predict the death of email spam before. Briefly, the argument goes like this:

1. as more people's mailboxes are protected by anti-spam filters,
2. and as those filters get more accurate,
   
3. fewer spam messages get delivered,
4. so fewer products get bought from spam,
5. so less commission goes to spammers,
6. so the economic incentive to spam dries up.

However, there's a wrinkle in this oh-so-neat reasoning... quarantines. Anti-spam products keep most of the spam email in a holding pattern, just in case they accidentally filter out a legitimate message (a "false positive"). Users can browse the quarantine to check that the filter isn't deleting good mail. The problem is that the quarantine will be full of the very solicitations that we need to keep away from users' eyes if we are to defeat spam. (There are other problems too, such as the wasted productivity involved in checking the quarantine.)

What should be done? Anti-spam software should delete messages that are clearly spam. When modern spam filters assess a message, they do so using a battery of tests and criteria. This process usually produces an aggregate score. Some spam messages score so high that they're clearly spam. There's practically zero chance that this might be a legitimate message. Anti-spam software should only present grey-area messages to the user in the quarantine.

Categories: spam, quarantine.