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.

Okay, I’m going to get a little bit snobby here. Unheard of, I know, but needs must.

YouGov the British online polling outfit has come up with a list of internet names which drive people up the wall. I’m climbing the wall just looking at them, especially as the list contains some of my very unfavourite terms, incuding “blog” and “wiki”. How can any serious person ever use the word, wiki? It sounds like a Tibetan yak.

Here’s the list in descending order of gruesomeness :

1. Folksonomy (groan, but it shouldn’t be top)
2. Blogosphere (okay, number 2 is about right)
3. Blog (now that should be #1 on anyone’s list)
4. Netiquette (pretty harmless, but what the hell)
5. Blook (now that is a bloody disgrace)
6. Webinar (hmm, doesn’t hit me viscerally)
7. Vlog (talk about mangling the English language)
8. Social networking (I’ve already run a mile just typing it)
9. Cookie (some things are just born to crumble)
10 = Wiki (should have been strangled at birth and higher in the list)
= Podcast (it sounds so insignificant, who let it live?)
= Avatar (Hindu holymen have got a long-standing option on this one)
= User-Generated Content (a mashup with almost no meaning).

The poll of 2000 internet users was done to mark the 10th anniversary of the word “weblog”. I wonder if any of them will last another 10 years?

If all the words expended on Fatblogging were reflected in results, we’d now be debating the horrors of Size Zero bloggers.

How is it, we would complain, that these skinny wretches can be allowed to practise Fatblogging when they look like matchsticks on stilts?

Well, the answer lies in human nature. Words are rarely turned into reality. The Tao Te Ching says : “He who speaks, does not know. He who knows, does not speak.”

Wise words indeed. It’s the motto of us Thinbloggers.

This is just a preamble to tell you that my Fatblogging efforts lost two whole pounds, only for one of my knees to give out. The result has been three days of keyboard bashing with virtually no exercise. Outcome? It’s all back on again.

Prospects : I still have 7 lbs to lose in 9 days. Will I succeed?

He who knows, does not speak.

We apologise for the intrusion of 30 spam comments which escaped our spam trap momentarily on Syntagma earlier today.

You would only be aware of them if you had commented on and subscribed to the posts concerned.

We have now deleted them and taken steps to ensure this won’t happen again.