Thursday 30 November 2000

Pic of the day: Who want pictures of spam anyway? Instead enjoy this bridge over trouble waters, here in the shadows of late November.

Spam me baby one more time

As I sit here writing, my computer plays a melodic trance track called "Angels in space" by Sonic Range. It's not bad at all, in my taste. (Of course, my taste differs sharply from most of my generation, but then again so do I.) The particular thing here, however, is that I learned about this track by a mass mail.

Actually the mails from MP3.com are not completely mass-produced. They contain a small paragraph of melodies picked on the basis of my past activity on their site. Yes, little brother watches me. And funny enough, two wrongs seems to make a right: I have found their mails to be welcome visitors in my inbox, as they've helped me find new fluffy music that I would probably not have taken the time to search out on my own.

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I've been an adherent of pointcasting since before it came to the Web. Before the Web was ever invented, in fact. In one "near future" story named 1992 (which I obviously wrote a bit before that time) the main character got his news in the morning from a computer which searched online for the type of news that particularly interested him. In the real world, in 1992, a company called Pointcast started to offer a reasonable facsimile of this service. Pointcast later was bought or something and became Entrypoint, which lately has merged with something else again. The service still allow a high degree of customization, though it never developed quite in the direction I had hoped.

Another company, Firefly, recommended music based on the music I reported as my favorites. It compared my choices with those of other users, and so we all benefited from each other's different knowledge. Sadly, this company also changed beyond recognition. Many online companies do that.

So I don't mind the kind of "spam" that has is personalized. The other day I got a spam mail from The Type Writers, a website that lets budding writers share their work. I may not feel like actually using their services (if services it be) but there was one poem there that I read and found deeply meaningful. Sadly I did not write down the name, and the site is too rapidly changing for me to find it again. It was something about not being God (after all). Now, the thing is that these people used the mail address that I use on my web site, and they particularly mentioned that they have noticed my interest in writing. Intriguingly, lots of other online journallers also got the same mail. Targeted spam.

I also occasionally get mail from The Economist after I registered as a reader there. These too tend to be interesting. Well, for an economist, that is!

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Sadly, the vast majority of e-mail (except for the two mailing lists) is unwelcome mass mail. I don't really know the details - you can see at a glance that it's worthless junk. Something about sex or easy money or something illegal. Let me check. "Great bussines", "Moneymaking breakthrough", "Undiscovered stock report". Neighbor, if you could make lots of money off something you would not tell me. Unless I was supposed to be the source of that money. Heh.

I've put some work into my e-mail filters, so that much of the spam goes directly into a folder called "spam". Mostly I just empty it when some time has passed, but sometimes I will read one for entertainment value. The uncertain cases go to my inbox. I wonder how long the bitstream will be floating with spam. Probably for a generation more, as there's a new sucker born every minute. Certainly my physical mailbox is filled pretty well with advertising, and that actually costs money to print. Now in all honesty, that's usually advertising for food or jewelry or furniture from more or less local (or at least national) shops. Not chain letters, porn and scams.

Then again, I live in Norway. Most of my e-mail originates in the USA. I have no idea of whether it portrays the real USA, having never been there. But the Americans I've met online have not been heavily into chain mail and economic adventure of dubious legality. (As for kinky sex, however ... Ahem. They may not be into it, but you never get them to admit that!)

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One final bit of trivia: The company that owns the trademark "Spam" may despair over giving name to mass mailing: but if not for this I might not even know that they existed, much less that they produced canned meat...