The Gmail account I use for Google Alerts is awash with spam. This morning I awoke to nearly 3000 choice items of trash, a fair chunk sitting in my inbox, presumably because the spam filters couldn’t cope. Many were of the “Mailer Daemon” type, with faux bounced emails.

Let’s assume it’s a temporary glitch, although I’ve noticed more spam in my G-inboxes lately, as have others. However, if Google is “only human”, we’ve been sold a pup.

Makes you wonder, though, about the mentality of some of the spammers. A lot of spam is just so pathetic it can’t possibly serve any purpose to the sender beyond a malicious satisfaction at having thrown a gremlin in the works.

Other spam is clearly coordinated and comes from a single source. The spammer is playing a numbers game. Since the cost per email is virtually nil, he (why do I assume it’s a “he”?) only needs a small percentage to be opened, releasing “active content” (viruses, trojans, worms) onto the receiver’s computer. The mail containing attachments is the most dangerous.

It will then only be a matter of time before the host machine is acting as a zombie clone, spreading havoc and denial of service to specially targeted organizations, like banks or Government departments. In May, the Russian Government is alleged to have brought down the communications systems of Estonia is a similar move.

Spammers come in all shapes and sizes.

Other ploys are to harvest your personal information and report back to base, usually in Asia or behind the old Iron Curtain, which seems to be sprouting new shoots in the dying oil age.

Similarly, spam comments on blog-type websites are a real nuisance. Syntagma Media gets up to 500 a day on some of our sites. With more than 40 active sites, that’s a real problem.

Comment spam is different. Most is search engine oriented — attempting to get a backlink to improve rankings on barebones Adsense sites. It’s all about traffic and the numbers game. The “no-follow” rule doesn’t seem to put these people off, but then Yahoo! appears to ignore it, and many publishers just switch it off.

Others are just links to porn sites or phishing setups where your personal information is tricked from you to create cloned credit cards and raid bank accounts.

What a wearisome prospect it is to be online these days. It only shows how powerful the benefits of the internet are that we put up with the overt dishonesty to make use of it.

Updated

I took the opportunity of great weather today to down tools and grab the camera for another photowalking session in my “Summer in Exeter” (Devon, England) series. I really am doing the 4-hour workweek this August — and why not.

The series can be seen in full by clicking on the Flickr logo in the sidebar.

The Exe Valley running through the heart of Exeter

This is taken from the centre of the city and shows the Exe Valley which runs through it. The great thing about Exeter is that you’re never far from country and farmland wherever you’re situated. You can see the 18th-century streets leading to the River Exe, which runs from right to left down the valley — unsighted in the picture.

These Georgian cottages (below) are in the street shown directly ahead in the pic above. If you were to remove the plastic rubbish bags and the overhead cables, you could film a Jane Austen novel here. Mind you, you’d have to lay a dirt surface across the street as they didn’t have metalled roads in those days. Takes you back though, doesn’t it?

Cottages from Jane Austen’s day — slightly gentrified

Going forward — across the other side of the street are the offices of a media company in another old building. I love the combination of modern knowledge-based companies housed in 18th-century surroundings. They are so complementary they could have been made for each other. You may then get some idea of where the new Syntagma Towers is going to be situated.

This is the end of the street where Georgian meets Victoriana. It’s so quaint here you almost expect to see Charles Dickens in a stove-pipe hat coming around the corner. There’s an office to let right ahead across the road, but it’s far too small for the industrial needs of Syntagma Media. Very pleasant spot for an internet business, though.

18th century meets Victoriana in the centre of Exeter

Below, and just around the corner from the cottages, is the Old Priory, which is 900 years old. That means it was built around 1107. Next to it, out of shot, is the Old Mint, where Exeter’s coinage was made. Strange to think the Government in London had nothing to do with such important stuff in those days — except collecting taxes in the coinage, of course.

The Old Priory and Mint, around 900 years old

But 900 years is a long time for a building to stand and remain so sturdy. It really doesn’t look a day over 850.

Lastly, a wonderful French-style office building with Exeter Cathedral behind. Now that really would make a great Syntagma Towers. We’d have to borrow the Cathedral towers, of course.

French-style office building with the Cathedral towering behind

I’m coming late to this meme which peaked yesterday. Basically, it’s another example of the cultural cringe and sense of inferiority still found in folk who make — or try to make — their livings online.

Jeremy Wright takes the prize as the best respondent with his highly-informative Ensight post on how much the unionization of a blog network would cost. #

On digital networks in particular, the problem arose when someone called them an “industry” — a certain J. Wright of Toronto in fact. But given the quality of his post, we’ll forgive him for that.

If blog networks really are an industry then clearly they must comply with industrial standards embedded in law. But not by any stretch of the imagination can they be put alongside General Motors, Rolls Royce or Microsoft. They are a sector at best — a branch of the Content Producers Guild, which is a bunch of disparate individuals in most cases, not public joint-stock companies.

Jeremy’s post, though, covered all the exits. As I’ve written here many times, there just isn’t enough money in online, original content creation to comply with every jurisdiction where you may have bloggers. At peak, Syntagma had writers in nine different countries. I have difficulty keeping up with our own laws, let alone the world’s legislative extravagances. Around 4000 new regulations for business were handed down from Cloud Nine (Parliament and Brussels) last year alone. Most just pile rigidities on top of complexity.

However, there are still some ragged-trousered half-bakes around who consider the Web as a substitute for the old Soviet Union. At Performancing, no less, someone’s even writing about “collectives”. Stick that red flag in the washing machine, you may need it before long.

The internet is about individuality, not collectivization. We have enough of that drab science in the real world, thank you very much.

I’m all for open source and charity. But they should never be forced down people’s throats or the best part of humanity will be choked off at birth.

A few years ago, when I headed up a marketing department at BT (British Telecom), I asked a Sunday Times tech journalist, whose work I admired, to write a short piece on packet switching (the base technology of the internet) for one of our publications.

When the copy arrived I thought it must be a joke. The piece was full of spelling mistakes and basic grammatical errors. I was shocked by the lack of pride in craftsmanship — although technically it was correct.

If I tell you it was only 300 words long and the asking price (agreed) was £300 ($600), you get some idea of my disappointment.

Naturally, I refused to pay — an office junior could have done better. The journalist pointed out that we had use of his name (true) and that he had sub-editors at the Sunday Times to knock his copy into shape. He then threatened that if I still refused to pay, he would get the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to picket BT Headquarters.

The Honcho above me ordered me to pay him off immediately. The Chairman would be incensed to find pickets on his red carpet entrance.

Although I’d done a bit of freelance journalism for the nationals before then, it was my first real taste of in-house pros. I was not impressed. (I should point out here that I commissioned other journalists after that and many were just fine.)

Now to blogging. In my view, online writers let themselves down by taking pride in the wild and woolly world of blogging. There are some excellent writers in the tech blogosphere, some even write for the nationals. Jeff Jarvis (The Buzz Machine), for example, pens frequent features for The Guardian (UK). And there are many others. The distinction between print and online publishing is narrowing by the day. Print journalism isn’t disappearing, it’s just taking over more and more of the online space.

The description “blogger” has a certain cachet in the political world, because politicians, with lots to hide, are terrified of them. The mainstream media watches them like hawks in case they miss a scoop or some realtime dirt. But this is a narrow slice of a much wider market for news, commentary and on-the-spot reportage.

I have to say, there’s a bit of cultural cringe about blogging in general, especially among those who take themselves half seriously. The belief that mainstream journalists are necessarily better, or better informed, is not borne out by facts. In the tech sphere, for instance, online material is usually way ahead of the MSM in detail and accuracy.

Take the recent Wall Street Journal non-story on the “10th anniversary of blogging”. The reporter made a good stab at the topic but was no match for people writing online who had been in on it personally. Like most inventions, there’s a long incubation period involving different individuals who each put a piece or two in the jigsaw puzzle. But the editor seemed to want a nice crisp date, and a hero to parade before the world. There wasn’t one, so an obscure figure was dredged from the swamp of time and shoved into the limelight with mud still running down his face.

D’you know, I can’t even remember his name, poor devil.

Back to the tag “blogger”. It’s a well-known fact that in the theatre a tragedian is taken far more seriously than a clown. Sometimes that’s unfair, because the clown can have more talent, and entertain many more people.

By tagging ourselves as bloggers, we hand a monumental advantage to the print journalist. We can be dismissed as clowns and unprofessional bag carriers.

For the political thorn-in-the-side, it’s a smart move. For anyone who wants to be taken seriously by the big, rotten world, not only their peers in Techmeme, it’s not just shooting oneself in the foot, it’s aiming a silver bullet at the heart.

So let’s resolve to be writers, journalists, authors — not bloggers. Forget the medium, think the message.

As our lamented former Monarch, King George V might have put it, “Bugger blogging!”

Sundays are usually “put your hands up time” where I come from. In other words, a time to fess up to your faults. #

So here goes. I have an addiction. A serious addiction. It causes me no end of problems and sweaty-palmed angst. I am addicted to …

Techmeme! #

Like many a tech-oriented internet user, I find Gabe Rivera’s almost-perfect creation irresistible. There are times when it seems to be the centre of the universe, with huge galaxies and bright stars spinning off in vast numbers from this fiery firmament of knowledge and innovation. Heck, Syntagma is quite often in there too.

Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit to get your attention. Because there are also times — increasingly so — when a blanket of gloom settles over me as I trundle through the familiar stories on shiny new applications and hardware which deliver to the user the tiniest smidgeon of improvement over their current expensively-procured setup. And the orgasmic excitement over the tweeniest fall from grace, or the most overblown prediction, has to be experienced to be believed.

I was glad, therefore, to wake up this Sunday morning to a cool blast of common sense by Dave Winer. Spinning off a New York Times article about Silicon Valley, he pens the following :

“The truth is that the people of Silicon Valley toil to find security in money, never getting there, while avoiding the pleasures of life, including the mythological creativity, spinning on a treadmill, doing nothing but striving to make money, but it’s never enough. … You can’t find security through money, because security is impossible. We die. Deal with it.”

The reason that hit home to me is that it’s what I’ve been doing all this year. Pulling back from the mesmeric allure of the “blog network industry” dream which promises that the creation of mediocre content online can produce an eight-figure fortune in a couple of years or so.

I’ve written about my disillusionment on that score many times here, and also on the alternative of simply running a relaxed, quality content business for fun and a decent, regular income. In turn, this creates time to operate in the real world as a hedge play and a grounding exercise.

Either way, Silicon Valley is for obsessives who continue to believe the Faustian deal with venture capital is the path to enduring happiness.

To paraphrase that old IRA man, Gerry Adams : Mephistopheles hasn’t gone away, you know.

Have you ever heard of the Library Angel?

It’s held to be the mysterious force that swivels your eyes toward the library shelf and the very book you need, or are looking for. Many reports of its existence have appeared in the literature for decades.

It happened to me this morning in a remainder bookshop, where I sometimes spend and hour or two on Saturdays.

First the preamble. Some years ago I started to write a novel, called Codex, about a strange ancient manuscript which contains a dark prediction about the fate of the world. A medieval scholar discovers the book in an old hoard and, after deciphering it, realizes that the world is following the same path outlined in the manuscript, which leads to a mindblowing ending.

Then I was offered a big job in London. I put the work on the novel aside and forgot about it for three years after which I decided not to continue with it.

Today, in the remainder shop I was pottering around when my eye was drawn to the pulp novel display table, which I never ever look at. There jumping off the stack into my line of sight was a paperback entitled Codex by Lev Grossman, published by Arrow (Random House) in Britain and Harcourt in the States.

Guess what it’s about? Right first time.

I bought it for a princely £1.99 ($4) and have not put it down since. It’s compulsively addictive, and quite likely better than mine would have been — but you never know.

My point is that had I written my Codex — and assuming it was at least as good — would it now be languishing on a remainder table at £1.99? And what does that say about the state of decent, non-Harry Potter fiction today?

My second point, is that if you want a great page-turner, which incidentally includes some fascinating passages about computer games, seek it out and give a little boost to poor Lev Grossman, whoever he or she may be.

Call it deja vu if you must. I believe it was the Library Angel showing me my lucky escape.

Update: Since no-one knew about the book I was writing, there is no way that Lev Grossman could have known about it. In fact, there are important points of difference between the two. Some themes are just floating in the ether at the time. The Da Vinci Code, for example created a whole genre in manuscript-driven books around the world.

My congratulations to Lev Grossman for bringing his idea to such a readable conclusion. I’m only sorry it ended up on the remaindered shelf. It doesn’t deserve it.