Learning to love Spam
I used to be very annoyed whenever spam mail managed to penetrate my mail filters. But no more! In a flash of enlightenment I found myself in awe of the sheer ingenuity (as well as the brass nerve) of the spammers. Now I see spam as an amazing phenomenon. Spam seems to pop up out of nowhere – although the ISPs, Google, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, are of course involved.
I started collecting spam, studying it! Of course I make sure to use (free) e-mail accounts extraneous to my normal Internet existence to avoid disruption. Thanks to Google, Yahoo, Hotmail that’s easy. Now I intend to send e-mails consisting of one word (‘holiday,’ or ‘car,’ or ‘restaurant,’ or ‘loan’), using one unique e-mail account for each experiment (and not using that account for anything else), and wait to see what pops up – then drawing charts of the rate of incoming spam.
Some of the accounts I’ve set up are left unused by me, so I can attract in and have a control experiment of the type of spam e-mails that are out there in the white noise. Having run one experiment with Gmail for nearly a year I can report that only two welcoming e-mails have arrived, and those within two days of setting up the account. So much for the ‘urban myth’ of e-mail providers precipitating spam! You should try it out for yourself – be a scientist and don’t take my word for it.
I’ve just challenged the students on my course Global Consequences of IT (GCIT) at LSE to see who can attract the most spam – the winner gets a free lunch at a local Thai restaurant. I’m interested in the various strategies they can devise to maximize spam attraction.
Try this out for yourself. Set up your own laboratory, and learn to love spam! The Internet is truly a wondrous ecosystem composed of the most fabulous creatures – spam is just one. It’s fascinating getting to grips with their Natural History.
This all came about following a discussion over a Starbuck’s latte on these and other Internet myths, which I was having with one the GCIT students, Heemanshu Jain. We’d just come from a seminar at LSE given by the founder of a successful Social Network. The entrepreneur had described how serendipity had played a large part in his success; a survey undertaken among his smallish network had been picked up by the international press during the ‘Silly Season,’ and the membership consequently exploded.
That got us to thinking about how ideas percolating on the web generating relatively little attention can suddenly become coherent and reach a critical mass, exploding into the general consciousness. Heeman and I bounced a number of ideas around – everything from why Google, Facebook, Amazon and e-Bay should become successful, and why similar sites should fail, to the ubiquity of spam. We were only too aware of the coherent urban myths out there that have absolutely no basis in fact. Hence we decided to undertake some simple experiments, starting with the humble spam.
We soon saw the sheer scale of the problem, and recognised the potential of setting up a blog (under the name WebCoherence) to invite fellow travelers with a similar fascination in how the web works, and how various web phenomena become coherent, to join in the experimentation.
We’ve still to work out the practicalities, but if we can interest a large enough number of people, then we can focus ‘The Human Computer’ at the issue, and find out some very valuable statistical information about the reality of how the web operates.
Come and join us!
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