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. (more…)

August 30th, 2007 | Uncategorized | No comments