Information Overload: Spam

Following on from an earlier post (about how the problem of Information Overload of the 21st Century is becoming as much about the quality of information as it is about the quantity); there is another type of information that has stopped the problem of Information Overload being overcome.

Any email address that's visible on the web is virtually guaranteed to start receiving Spam emails. Blogs gets indexed by search engines; automatic processes can check through indexed sites and fill in online forms, for example to add comments on blog sites with links to drive traffic to sites (usually sex related), so any public blog will receive comments and pingbacks from unrelated sites (usually sex-related), either trying to gather links to improve their Pagerank, trying to attract visitors to their site, or simply to send more generic emails to any email addresses they find. (Which sometimes makes me wonder if more machines than people read my blog...)

When I get back from a weekend away from the city, computers and the internet, I tend to come back to about 30 or so comments on my blog; all spam, mostly selling prescription drugs, but one or two directing to pornography. That might not seem like much, but considering that I've put very little effort into promoting my blog, it makes me much more sympathetic when I see blogs which have shut down comments due to floods of spam. I'll also have a few dozen emails that are pure junk, which I have to sort through before I can start checking my "real" emails. It seems that the more efficient I get at using the web, the more time I have to spend sorting through spam.

Advertisers vs. Consumers and the future of online advertising.

Once you're connected to the internet, you have access across the network; one of the principles it was built on is that traffic can travel freely through any one of myriad pathways. The World Wide Web has been free since CERN made it freely available to all in 1993.

Historically, web browsers have been given away for free; Netscape's browser was freely available for noncommercial use, while Netscape made their money from selling server-side software. Internet Explorer was given away for free with the Windows operating system, it's development being funded by other parts of Microsoft's business. Firefox is a free, open source web browser that is steadily increasing it's market share ("Open-source" means that the source code is also freely available; so that anyone with sufficient programming knowledge can modify the browser to work the way they want it to, or offer improvements to be included in future releases.)

It's not a surprise then, that there is something of an expectation that content on the internet will be free; you don't expect to have to pay to visit a website, or to read an article. The news is free, weather forecasts are free, and reading about other people's thoughts is free. Where websites do charge money for access, it's usually for some sort of premium service with a free alternative, such as a free trial for 30 days, or a free but restricted membership with a paid-for but unrestricted or advert-free alternative.

However, websites aren't free to run; apart from the time taken to put a website together, the site also needs a computer to act as a server (which needs to be kept running and it's software up to date), a connection to the internet (which needs to be paid for), and of course power to keep the whole thing going. The way website owners cover their costs depends on the nature of the site; perhaps the site is an integral part of an online business, such as an online shopping company where the website would be a part of the operational costs, or possibly a part of a branding or advertising project funded by a marketing budget. Where there is no obvious revenue source, website owners often cover their costs (and sometimes make a profit) by selling advertising space.

There has been some fuss recently about a website that's appeared, encouraging website owners to block users of the Firefox browser; http://whyfirefoxisblocked.com. The site includes an explanation as to why users have been redirected to their site, along with instructions for website owners explaining how to block visitors using the Firefox browser and redirect them to the WhyFirefoxIsBlocked.com site.

Vinyl vs CDs

On the 17th August 1982, the worlds first Compact Disc was manufactured at a Philips factory in Germany; a copy of "The Visitors" by ABBA.

To mark the 25th birthday of this piece of technology today, I'm reposting this article I wrote for an old website in 2002. My favourite thing about it is what it doesn't say, as opposed to what it does— as it was written about a year before the iTunes Music Store opened, apart from a passing reference to MP3s I've completely ignored the (at the time almost entirely illegal) music download market which seems to have replaced the tape player/walkman, and presently appears to be the best bet to replace the CD.

I remember the first record I ever owned. I had yet to form any musical opinions or tastes of my own, so the fact that it was a compilation of what someone somewhere judged to be the best singles that they had aquired the publishing rights for that year meant it was pretty much ideal for me at the time.

It also happened to be on CD, which shows that I can't really hark back to the golden age of when records were records and expect to be taken seriously by anyone. On the other hand, it also shows that this isn't just some nostalgic rant about the good old days; 2002 was the 20th anniversary of CDs release onto the market.

But that doesn't change the fact that vinyl is the best available format for a record to be on.

Butterflies breaking wheels.

There's an effect in chaos theory called the Butterfly Effect— often described as how the movements of a butterfly in Brazil can cause (or prevent) a storm in Texas. It refers to how a tiny effect can have a massive consequence, and has been the subject of books, films and television programmes.

In the age of Web2.0 and user generated content, there's something new about the effect of traffic flows on the Internet.

In the earlier days of the web, when websites tended to be 'closed shops' with possibly one or two external links to related websites, the web tended to be, from the users' point of view, a bunch of connections from the user to the websites. It was almost as though we, the users, were sat at the hub of an international network, with thousands of connections reaching out across the web. (There's a certain irony to how this illusion comes from an anthropocentric view of a global decentralised network— not unlike the pre-Copernican idea of the Earth being the centre of the universe simply because it looks like everything revolves around us.) We were aware that there were other links connecting everything to everything else, but they weren't particularly important or relevant to us.

Now, in the so called Web 2.0 era, where content is frequently contributed or edited by users, or information is pulled from a number of different sites onto a single page, the truly erratic nature of the ebbs and flows of traffic over the internet has become more visible to web users; it no longer feels so much as though we're sat at the centre of our own web, but just a part of the flow of traffic.

The Day the World (wide web) Stood Still…

(…for about an hour and a half…)

The meteoric rise of Facebook continues to astonish me. No doubt it's in part due to my own demographic positioning; apparently living in London (the largest geographic group on Facebook with around 840,000 members- which is around a tenth of the city's population) and being in the fastest rising age group (25 and over), it makes sense that I'd naturally be seeing a lot of my friends joining up and talking about it.

Earlier this week, after an apparent security glitch, Facebook closed down for a while (about 90 minutes or so, it seems.)

Now, there's a number of websites that I've visited regularly over the years that I've been using the internet, ranging from functional tools like search engines or web-based email, to social sites like chatrooms or discussion forums (the Web 1.0 version of a Facebook group, I suppose), to the newer Web 2.0 sites like Digg and Flickr. I've followed the progress and speculation about films, TV programmes, bands and festivals. As a result, there have been a number of times when I've gone to a website and been momentarily horrified to find it temporarily closed down.

But I can't remember a single instance where 90 minutes of a site's downtime has been as newsworthy as earlier this week, when Facebook closed down for about an hour and a half for "upgrades." I had pretty much expected to read stories about it on sites technology-oriented sites like Digg.com (which had a couple of stories speculating on the reasons behind the downtime) but I was a bit more suprised to read about it in the Metro this morning. (Not that I normally read the Metro I might add, but I'd just finished the book I was reading at the time…)