大象传媒

Spam, spam, lovely spam

• Darren Waters
• 31 Mar 08, 15:31 GMT

"Spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam," sang the group of Vikings in the famous Monty Python sketch of 1970.

Eight years later the first spam message was sent, while it took another 15 years before unsolicited bulk e-messages were given the popular moniker.

I've been speaking to the man who first coined the term in the sense we understand it today, . And you can see the first recorded use of "spamming" as a term .

Back in 1993 discussion boards were the popular method of communicating and sites became hit by "spammers" who flooded the boards with abusive postings.

A US man called Richard Depew which would strip out the abusive postings automatically, explained Joel.

"The thought was that if people were rude enough to post thousands of messages about crap they wouldn鈥檛 respond to polite 'don鈥檛 do that' messages," said Joel.

"But his program sort of broke and ironically it started posting thousands and thousand of its own messages and shut down many systems that were not designed to cope with that many messages.

鈥淲e were trying to reach him through the night to shut it all down - and eventually did so. In sober light of day I posted a summary describing it as "spamming" a discussion list.

"That was the first usage that was recorded. After that usage it did come to refer more directly to out of control messaging."

Until 1993 spam was not a real problem on discussion boards and e-mail spam was virtually non-existent because people's e-mail addresses were largely unknown.

"The world wide web sparked spam because people started to put their e-mail addresses on their site," said Joel.

He told me: "I would really like to see the problem be not so prevalent.

"We have this awesome tool to make it possible for people in any part of the planet to exchange ideas with one another and yet people are going out of their way to not use it because of the spammers, because of the jerks."

Spam is a blight on our digital lives But four years ago Bill Gates spam would soon be a thing of the past.

It's pretty evident that that prediction didn't come to pass - so why not?

"When Bill Gates announced that the solution at the time reflected the problem as it stood then. The problem is that spam has not stood still," Mark Sunner, chief analyst at Message Labs told me.

"All spam is unsolicited and the thinking at the time was that if you can prove the sender is who they say they are - called authentication - then you can avoid spam.

"At the time that statement was true - but true only if spammers had stood still. If spammers had done nothing else then that prediction would have been true."

One of the main issues since Gates spoke is that e-mail authentication technologies, like Domain Keys, have yet to be adopted widely enough to influence the flow of spam.

And so we continue to live with a torrent of spam - not just in our e-mail, but on blogs too.

And for the man who coined the term, how does spam affect him today?

"Bit by bit we're having to stop using discussion groups because they are flooded with spam.

"I have about 3,500 in my spam folder this morning."

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Mapping our lives online

• Darren Waters
• 31 Mar 08, 11:18 GMT

Over the weekend blogger and businessman Loic Le Meur an interesting conversation about social media and the decentralised way in which personal information was being spread.

He drew a handy map to show the different threads of his digital life.

Loic, who I spoke to a few months ago, is arguing that while all these tools have their place, it's hard currently to locate them centrally in one place. There are tools emerging, such as , which pull together these strands but it is still quite difficult to assemble your digital life in one place.

I know exactly what he means - tools like , , blogs, , (the list goes on and on and on) are great ways to start conversations but they remain, more or less, as digital islands.

There are ways to bridge these islands - and using is the obvious candidate. Almost every social media service today generates an RSS feed and tools like Friendfeed can pull them all together.

You can see my FriendFeed . It's an amalgam of my posts to Twitter, my Flickr photos and posts to the dot.life blog. If I wanted I could add YouTube videos I have posted or favourited, my Delicious links, music I've listened to on etc.

And your feed, together with the feeds of your friends, combines into one meta-Friend Feed, which itself is an RSS feed. So I can follow the lives of my friends, through whatever RSS feeds they themselves have aggregated onto Friendfeed, into an RSS Reader. Phew!!

It means the minute by minute lives of others can be monitored minute by minute whenever you are online.

You can do something similar by combining Twitter with a tool called . It turns almost every RSS feed into a tweet. So every new story on the 大象传媒 News Tech section, or posting to this blog, or photo I post to Flickr is turned into a tweet on Twitter.

Social media tools are giving us ever more power to document our lives in ever more granular forms. And there are tools emerging that pull these micro-aspects of our lives together.

Loic bemoans the inability to site this cataloguing of his life in one place - ie his blog. I don't think this will be too much of an issue for too long as the creators of Friendfeed are about to release an API, which should see the tool becoming more flexible.

But I don't think this is the real issue. For me it is about the layers of openness we want our lives to have and how to control who sees our information and where.

RSS is a great tool but it has one declamatory mode. I want to be able to choose who sees different aspects of my digital life in one meta-destination.

For example: I want a tool like Friendfeed to let me control who can see my Twitter feed, who can view my Flickr photos, who can watch my YouTube videos etc.

What's needed is a more sophisticated public/private system for our digital lives. There are plenty of aspects of my life I'm happy to share with the world but some things that should be reserved for friends, family, work colleagues etc.

At the moment I have to resort to one-to-one tools like e-mail or instant messaging to share more private aspects of my life.

But wouldn't it be great if we could use Twitter or Facebook or Friendfeed etc to target different aspects of our lifes to different people?

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