early voting results 2008

poll results obama vs mccain

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

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.

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 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.

* 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 ;-)