``I'm not your regular person, I guess.'

Guess what? Spam pays

You know that saying that crime doesn't pay? Every day it's becoming increasingly clear to me that spam does in fact pay.

As I delete comment spam after comment spam from PVRblog, I've noticed the products being sold are almost all over-the-counter or shady pharmacutical drugs that can be easily bought, sold, and shipped. Most of my email spam mirrors that as well.

It's a low-risk thing when you think about it. You buy a minimal amount of inventory, then broadcast your message from one of the hundreds of businesses setup to help you, or free spam cannon programs you can download. They say that some percentage of folks buy stuff in spam, and even if that's only 0.1% success, when you send out 5 million messages, you can make $5,000 if each sale gives you a profit of one dollar. If your profit is higher (and it should be), you can sell much less and still make that much money. Imagine it: one day of doing the devil's work and you've made as much as you will in a month of work at a $60k desk job.

Four to five years ago, I used to spend quite a bit of energy on combating spam. I read anti-spammer email lists and newsgroups, I used a spamcop account, and I sent messages daily to every abuse@hostingprovider address I could track down that hosted these bastards. I watched hundreds of other vigilante spam fighters do the same and as we shut down site after site and got person after person cut off from their service, I noticed they kept coming back, only multiplied. Eventually I grew weary of the work I put out that didn't seem to have much impact on the problem and started filtering my spam instead.

A few days ago I got some spam from a guy that has been sending me the same exact niche spam for 8 years. I know the guy that is doing it, I know where he lives, and I can tell you what dialup account he's using right now if I looked. I've reported him a dozen times and gotten him kicked off ISPs but all these years later he's still hawking his crappy products. Obviously, the guy never gave up and I'm convinced there's a financial reason for it. Spam pays, and it probably pays big.

All this is a long way of saying that I have no doubt that every word of Mark Pilgrim's post about the future of weblog spam is the gospel truth. I've seen it happen in email and usenet, and it's going to happen to weblogs as well, and as hard as we fight, it's not going to do a whole hell of a lot of good (Jason posted pretty much the same thing a week ago).

Even with my technical knowledge, a handful of custom filtering server-side and client-side programs, spam is getting through to me in such quantities that I wish I didn't have to rely on email so much. Weblog spam is making me rethink commenting on any movable type site I run. It's exhausting, pointless to fight, and I really wish we could come up with a magic bullet that removes the economic incentive to spam.

Dream Mergers - guess which one I put
in?

Susan Mernit tipped me to this.....

Jeff tries to guess what Dave's up to

Jeff Sandquist is trying to guess what Dave Winer is up to. He has a great idea. Instead of putting the onus on weblog writers to add metadata to our posts (I hate putting titles on my posts, for instance, or even clicking a box when I post) why not give that power to readers? Let them add the metadata that will make weblog posts more useful to more people.

By the way, I added a title to this post, but not to the others. Just so those of you who are reading in RSS news aggregators can see what it looks like when I take the time to do that.

Shark Tank: Guess they just like him
better as a consultant

Guess who's been scarfing FOAF for their
YASNS?

OK - so one of the first complaints I get about FOAF is privacy.  And I blindly just keep repeating the mantra: "each system is repsonsible for their own security."  And then someone asks "do you think everyone will want their FOAF files sent around" and I reply "then don't put anything into your FOAF you don't want others to know about".

OK - so I'm sitting here - waiting for the results of two FOAF based systems to sucessfully import and export FOAF files between each other - and others have said "we can just spider and scarf" - just like any other red-blooded web developer.

And I answer "yes - but we want to get the end-user involved in all this".

So this morning I get an invite into a new system - called AskMyNetwork.com - truly a YASNS. But this one's got some twists.  It's a recommendation (read: reputation) network, enabling folks to recomend services, people, restaurants, etc.  And it (apparently) has scarfed up a bunch fo FOAF and they're using it for..... well let me tell you how.

1.  So I'm looking around this YASNS and there's a button that says:

You have at least 48 potential connections - users that the network believes you already know, but haven't added to your connections list yet.

2.  So I click on it - and sure enough, there's good old Mr. Joi Ito.  "Ah" - I say, someone warm and fuzzy.  So I click on it - and the system asks me for Joi's email.  Huh?

3. Now wait a minute - how did they know a) that I know Joi and b) that they DON'T know Joi's email......

4.  Hmmmmm - there was also a long list of 48 other people there. Hmmmmmm.  Think.  Think.

5.  Oh shit - they scarfed a FOAF file from somewhere (I think it's the set of FOAFs I have on Phil Pearson's TopicExchange!  Ouch - now I have to eat my own dogfood!

6.  Solution?  Give the end-user the explicit control over exporting FOAF.  That's what the FOAFnet is going to do.

7.  So Dom Ramsey - if you're reading this - please make AskMyNetwork.com a FOAFnet compliant site and work with us to make ALL FOAF based sites adhere to these simple rules.....

A) No one's FOAF is exported without their explicit permission.

B) No one gets bothered if they don't provide their email - get the hint!

C) Please stop collecting FOAF files as if they're little trophies to be put up on a mantle and admired.

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Next week I'l critique the entire premise of AskMyNetwork and why these recommendations should be locked up inside some data silo - or set free - and placed onto open servers.

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Epilog - they do have some coolio animated gifs though........

File under 'Seeing Art Everywhere' ... I
guess

i guess you need to be told that the
sonyericsson t610 was j

Guess What -- You Asked for Those Pop-Up Ads