Benjamin M. Hill

There are many ways to comprehend all the new communication methods available through the Internet.  One method is to chart the methods on their relative investment per communication (how much time and effort you put into each outgoing message) vs. the audience size of the communication (how many people might see your message).  This allows a comparison of twitter, SMS, IMing, blogging, spamming, and traditional media, as well as highlighting the empty space that twitter filled, providing clues as to why twitter has seen so much recent success. Check out the positioning at my SlideShare site: Communication Spectrum

Blog spam (blam), search engine spam (spamdexing), fax spam, wikipedia spam, second-life spam, Instant Messenger spam (spim) - you name an electronic form of communication, I’ll show you a spam that invades it. Taking into account the following variables: Overhead: The costs and overhead of electronic spamming include bandwidth, developing or acquiring an email/wiki/blog spam tool, taking over or acquiring a host/zombie, etc. TransactionCost: The incremental cost of contacting each additional recipient once a method of spamming is constructed, multiplied by the number of recipients. Risks: Chance and severity of legal and/or public reactions, including damages and punitive damages Damage: Impact on the community and/or communication channels being spammed (see Newsgroup spam) Benefit: total expected profit from spam ConversionRate: chance of someone who is spammed adding to your Benefit total The back of the napkin formula to predict “if spam will happen” is Risks*AudienceS...

It continues to amaze me how “inconsiderate” computer applications are. How many of the programs installed on your PC are are guilty of the following? Scattering shortcuts across the start menu, quick-launch bar, desktop, and who-knows-where-else Unexpected internet browser task-bars Installing into the launch-at-startup or services list Consuming as much of your memory and CPU as necessary to ensure that they run at peak efficiency and can be launched in an instant Bundling mandatory trial applications A large percentage of my “computer maintenance” time is weeding the garden: removing extra shortcuts, yanking out memory-resident applications, uninstalling bundled extras, then figuring out what else I can remove without killing the OS. How many friend (or parent’s) computers have you seen with a three-column start menu and a 20-icon task bar, because each program think it needs to be pinned in the start menu, on the quick launch bar, and a few places in the start menu… gah. ...