Internet statistics to blow your mind

March 1, 2010 by

I’m a bit of an internet statistics junkie – I actually enjoy checking the visitor stats for this site. When I send out an e-mail newsletter it interests me to see how many where opened and what content people found the most useful.

Mashable posted a great video on Friday that outlines some statistics on Internet use, and I wanted to share that with you here:

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from Jesse Thomas on Vimeo.

There are some amazing numbers there: 81% of all e-mail is spam!? Thank goodness for spam filters. I was (for some reason) surprised to see that there are more Internet users in Europe than the US. I don’t know why, but I often think of the US as being the market to crack… but perhaps I’ve been ignoring European users. Of course, then there are the massive numbers in Asia to be considered too!

The huge amount of traffic Facebook receives is just mind blowing, although I can see why that would be the case given the social networking, applications and games offered there. That massive user base is one of the reasons Geek-Speak has a Facebook page too – you have to go where the people are if you want them to hear about you!

I’m also a bit surprised that just over half of all web pages are blogs, according to the video! If ever there was an indication of the massive take-up of blogging, that’s it. Sure, I guess a lot of those are failed or failing blogs (ones that the owner hasn’t written on for a long period of time) but it certainly shows there’s an interest in people setting up their own piece of blogging real-estate.

What went through your mind when you watched the video? Did anything surprise you? Is there anything you’d dispute? I’ve love to know what you think, so please leave a comment!

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Combatting E-mail Spam

June 8, 2009 by
Spam

I don’t know how it’s done, but it seems that as soon as you set up a new e-mail address you start receiving unsolicited messages trying to sell you things. Get a degree by post! Take these pills and, er, please your girlfriend! And so on… These e-mails are called spam and, if you’ve encountered them, are incredibly annoying. So how can you stop them?

Firstly, guard your e-mail address. Don’t put it on a webpage unless you disguise it in some way (via JavaScript or by using an image, for instance). The reason for this is some spam mailers automatically crawl websites looking for e-mail adddresses to add to their mailing lists. Once you’re on a mailing list it’s very difficult to get off it, so it’s easier not to get added in the first place!

If you are receiving spam, though, there are a number of things to do.

As tempting as it is to reply and tell the spammers to get lost, doing so will only confirm that your e-mail address is valid. Valid e-mail addresses are worth more to spammers than unconfirmed ones, so by letting them know your address is “real” you’ll end up on even more mailing lists as your details get sold on. You might also see an “unsubscribe” link in the e-mail. Even there it’s best not to use it unless you know you genuinely signed up for e-mails from that company. If you’re receiving unsolicited e-mails it’ll probably make no difference if you try to unsubscribe and could end up confirming your details again to a spammer who will sell them on.

Some mail software can “bounce” e-mails back, making it look as if they have been delivered to a non-functioning e-mail address. Whilst there’s some satisfaction in doing this, imagining that evil spammer having to wade through screens and screens of bounce notifications, I don’t think it actually makes a difference. I still get spam from companies I’ve bounced e-mails back to, and I’d be willing to bet nobody even sees the notifications. My advice here is do it if it’ll make you feel better, but as for actually combatting spam? It’s not really an effective solution.

The best solution I’ve come across is to employ some sort of adaptive spam filter. This checks your e-mails and highlights or deletes the e-mails it thinks are spam. The reason I’d recommend going for an adaptive one is that it’s very handy to be able to teach your filter what you consider to be spam and what you consider to be legitimate. I’ve used Mailwasher before (when I as a PC user) and found it to be pretty good. Apple Mail also has an adaptive junk mail filter, but by far the best I’ve come across is actually built into Google Mail. After a bit of time, marking spam as such and correcting e-mails incorrectly identified as spam, the amount of junk mail hitting my inbox has dropped to practically zero, whilst my spam folder sits at about 1,000 junk messages per month.

I don’t think we’re ever going to get rid of spam completely and, once you’re on a spam mailing list, I don’t think you can ever stop it being sent to your mail account. But if you can automate the process of deciding what’s spam and what’s not, you’re well on the way to reclaiming your inbox from the spammers.

If you have any comments to make, or if I missed something, please to contribute in the comments.

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Turning spam e-mails into art

September 17, 2008 by
Spam Recycling

Turn your spam e-mails into art at
SpamRecycling.com

Wouldn’t it be great if you could do something useful with all that spam e-mail that clutters your inbox? Spam Recycling aims to promote real-life recycling, but the site itself takes your spam messages and turns them into art – pretty cool, eh?

To take part, find a piece of spam e-mail in your inbox (shouldn’t be too hard) and remove all personal information from it. Then forward it to [email protected] In just a few minutes you will receive an e-mail back containing a unique link allowing you to view all the piece of spam you have sent in. Visit the site, hit “start” and watch as your spam is turned into all kinds of interesting patterns. You can control the background colour and the pattern formation.

In an odd way, this is kind of addictive. It’s not as if anything useful is happening to your spam e-mail, but it is good to imagine that it has finally moved from being pointless to being an art form.

Go on; send that e-mail and see what you end up with. Now if only there were a way to make money from spam… hmm… anyone got any ideas?

Filed Under: Art and Design Tagged With: , ,

Splogs, Scrapers, and YOUR content

August 25, 2008 by
Spam!

To misquote those anti-piracy ads: you wouldn’t steal a car… you wouldn’t steal a handbag… you wouldn’t steal a television… but would you steal someone’s content?

Content scrapers are rife on the Internet. If you’ve had a blog for any length of time and you track your incoming links, you might have noticed that some of them are from sites that publish your articles verbatim. What’s that all about?

Well, on one level, this is a piece of smart thinking. Set up a script to grab articles on your chosen subject from somewhere like Technorati, and a site can become an aggregator of others’ content. Even better, it can become a great source of information from all over the net and, by adding a bit of advertising, the owner can make a bit of money out of it. And, so long as they include a link back to the original article, there’s no harm in it. Right?

Wrong! The ranking algorithms that search engines use are a bit of a mystery, but it’s thought that part of the algorithm is the quality of the incoming links to a site. Not just the quantity, but that quality. So whilst it might be nice to have several sites pointing to yours, if they’re all splogs (spam blogs) then they aren’t going to help you much. In fact, search engines may well penalise you for these links, assuming that your site must be full of spam as well.

Let’s also consider the traffic implications. If someone searches for a term that would normally bring them to your site, but instead they end up on a splog showing your content, they aren’t going to visit your site. Or, if they do, they’ll realise they already read the article and will bounce away again. If you are trying to build a community of engaging readers, or even if you’re trying to make some cash through advertising, this kind of thing can really damage your pursuit of those goals.

So, quite apart from the fact that they are copying your content, splogs have the potential to damage your search engine rankings and leech away your readers and/or advertising revenue. So what should you do?

Well, unless you’re willing to get really heavy with lawyers and such like, there’s not an immense amount you can do. But you can make things difficult for them. Splogs and scrapers are there to make money, so why not try and make it as hard as possible for them to do so?

  1. If they have advertising – report them to their advertisers: most advertisers don’t want to be associated with spam, so visit their site and see if there’s a way to report one of their publishers as a splog. If they’re using adsense you can click on the “ads by Google” link and then on a link at the bottom of the page marked, “Send Google your thoughts on the site or the ads you just saw”. This will let you report a violation and report the splog for nicking your content.
  2. Report them to search engines – since search engine ranking is important for getting traffic, you should report splogs to search engines to have them removed from or moved further down the index. Google’s spam reporting page is here. Apparently you can do it on Yahoo by visiting their site explorer and there should be a link on the “inlinks” section allowing you to report spam links… but I can’t find the button! Anyone seen it?
  3. If they are hosted by a reputable hosting company, try and report them to their hosts as well – there’s no guarantee that the host will do anything about it, but you never know.

Have you had experience of people scraping your content? If so, how did you deal with it? And do you have any other tips for dealing with splogs and scrapers? Let us know in the comments.

Spam image by David-Trattnig

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