Monday, July 21, 2003

Spam...yuck!
Today a collegue and I gave a spam presentation to a group at our company. Here are some ugly statistics I thought I'd post:

MessageLabs
   April 2003, 134 million emails scanned
   44.2% were spam
   Increase of 17.8% on the March figure

Ferris Research
   Cost to US business this year: $10 Billion in decreased productivity and increased IT costs
Nucleus Research
   Average lost productivity per employee per year: 1.4%
   Average cost of spam per employee per year: $874
   In 2003, the average company will lose one out of every 72 employee’s productivity to spam

If any of you out there are trying to fight the war on spam I highly recommend the article A Plan for Spam by Paul Graham. It goes into detail about Bayesian filtering which is a statistical approach to filtering spam. I have implemented this at my company with great success.

Thursday, July 17, 2003

AmphetaDesk
AmphetaDesk is an open source news aggrigator. You can subscribe to all sorts of RSS feeds and create your own news page. There are versions available for Windows, Mac and Linux. If you don't know what an RSS feed is, click on the link at the left to my Digital News Digest for examples. It's cool!

Wednesday, July 16, 2003

Mozilla
This is a good sign.Internet Week > Open Source > AOL Spins Off Mozilla To Independent Foundation > July 16, 2003. It is good that Mozilla is out in the open for real now. Whether you use it or not it will help you by driving market forces to continue to develop standard and better, more useful browsers.

Thursday, July 03, 2003

Hide your mailto links
If you have a web site you really don't want to leave your mailto links exposed for any spam crawlers to find and start spamming you to death.I read about this in a document published by IBM. They provided a Perl script but this site makes if very easy for anyone to do.Form to create a mailto link hidden from spammers

More site changes...
I changed the links at the left and added the Digital News Digest page.

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

Template change
Of course no one saw this because no one knew about it but I change the default template a bit. The ones that Blogger give you has the text at the top too big. What's up with that? There's no reason for the title of a blog to be so huge.

rss
I've been experimenting with RSS. Look for a link soon to my Digital New Digest.

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

Wiki!
So here is a whole new and different concept in web collaboration: USATODAY.com - It's a Wiki world out there for the Web's groupmind. Ok, so it's not that new. It's been around since 1995 but the idea is catching on in a big way.

Blogging...what is it?
I'm still trying to figure out this whole blogging thing. I mean, I know how to do it (obiously) but I'm not quite sure what it means to the world.

As is typical of me, when I'm puzzling things like this I like to read as much as I can. For a while now I've been reading the columns er, blogs, of Dave Winer. Dave created Radio Userland, which to the uninitiated is software that lets people blog.

Dave posted an interesting piece today in audio format from guest blogger Chris Lydon:DaveNet : Chris Lydon Speaks of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Weblogs. A pipline to the web in audio format that could stay around indefinately has interesting prospects. Chris' comments on Emerson are interesting as well.