Karmona Pragmatic Blog

4 November 2008 | Election Day | Top search terms by Google Trends

early voting results 2008

poll results obama vs mccain

free stuff for voting // a little suprising… ?! :)

With the recent Russian spam attack on my business inbox, I have found out three interesting facts:

First, I really “prefer” my spam in English / Hebrew.
Second, Mr. Gates didn’t keep his promise* (what???) to a world without spam…
Third, Spam isn’t personal, everybody have it and Symantec have some nice monthly statistics** about it so we could all feel normal back again.

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Spam highlights from last two reports (8-9/2008)

- More than 80% of our emails are spam!

- Top spam “stories”

• Breaking News…McCain Chooses Paris Hilton as Running Mate
• Download IE7 … the Latest Version (I know someone who tried it :)
• Malware + Spam + Phishing = The Trifecta of Threats to Financial Institutions (I got a lot of these…)
• Olympic-Themed Spam Continued in August 2008
• Spammers’ Bullseye: Obama, McCain and the Olympic Games
• World War III Spam Hoax (I must admit, this one is really innovative :)
• Phishing Email Targets Microsoft POP3 User Data
• Bilingual Spam Messages Emerge

- Spam categories

• Internet 27% (was 18% in June)
• Products 20%
• Financial 17%
• Health 17%
• Scams 7%
• Leisure 4%
• Fraud 4%
• Adult 4%

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* “Two years from now, spam will be solved” (Bill Gates, DAVOS – Switzerland; Jan. 2004)
** Each month Symantec publishes its State-of-the-Spam-Report highlighting major spam events or trends observed during the previous month.

Technorati have finally started to release the “state of the blogosphere” report.

I must admit I was really waiting for this shitty report and I hate the fact that I need to see this reports in shards (will be released in five consecutive daily segments) but it was worth waiting until now.

2008 Blogosphere statistics includes:

• 133 million blogs (indexed by Technorati since 2002) was 70 million last year… (The State of the Live Web, April 2007)
• 7.4 million blogs posted in the last 120 days
• 1.5 million blogs posted in the last 7 days (did you? ;-)
• 900,000 Blog posts in 24 hours = ~10 Blog posts per sec. (!!!) – Technorati claims that spam filtering have reduced the numbers they published last year (1.4 million blog posts per day)
• 66% of bloggers are male…
• 63% are ages 25 to 44
• 79% personal blogs
• 59% have been blogging for more than two years.
• 44% are parents
• … and with the mean annual revenue of $6K blogs are also claimed to be profitable (a.k.a. not mine)

WOW (!!!)

Dunbar’s number is the supposed cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable social relationships.
In a 1992 article, Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates* to predict a social group size for humans and using a “simple” regression equation on data for 38 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human “mean group size” of 150 (with 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).

Dunbar’s Friends is my definition (and trademark ;-) to those few “real”, trusted and known people in your huge** online social network***.

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* Primatologists have noted that, due to their highly social nature, non-human primates have to maintain personal contact with the other members of their social group, usually through grooming (and not “poking” as you might be expecting :-). The number of social group members a primate can track appears to be limited by the volume of the neocortex region of their brain.

** Did you know that Robert Scoble is following 21,060 people in Twitter, 2,992 in FriendFeed and only 71 “lousy” friends in Flickr…

*** Social Network for Dummies - Lee and Sachi LeFever (a.k.a. the CommonCraft’s family :) have created a wonderful video explaining social network in plain English.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau Y2K statistics (accuse me for being nostalgic but this is as good as it gets until 2010)

* 7 most common Americans surnames are Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller or Davis.

* 4 million surnames  are held by only one person.

…

* This can be very helpful when you are trying to guess someone name… with ~2,376,206 Smiths, I suggest Mr. Smith.

* This could be problematic when you are looking for Mary or James Smith and all you have is the name…

* Moti Karmona isn’t even there ;-)