era//404 Viral Video Gets Rave Reviews on Gawker, Adrants

Last summer, era//404 was approached by Beautiful Children (2008 Random House) author, Charles Bock, to design and develop an online home for his novel. Upon its launch in November 2007, BeautifulChildren.net steadily grew to become an online portal for fiction readers and newly-found Bock enthusiasts. And while the site created a community for fans of Beautiful Children, it also provides a hub for teenage runaways, victims of the adult film industry, and kids who found themselves needing help, and people to talk to.

The novel, which focuses on the events that lead to a young boy’s disappearance in Las Vegas, follows a stream of inter-connected runaways through casinos, pawn shops, desert punk parties, strip clubs and seedy adult film studios.

“I wanted a site that would be its own world,” said author Charles Bock. “A site that supplemented the book and the characters. A place where a visitor would come away convinced this was going to be the coolest novel of all time, where someone could go to learn about the book, and where, at the same time, someone who had read the book could visit and feel like they were getting even more of the world of the novel.”

“Charles was quite specific on wanting the site to be more than just a marketing initiative,” said era//404 Technical Director, Mike Citarella. “Part of the reason the novel is so important is that it doesn’t sensationalize the runaways’ plight, but opens readers to the harsh reality of the characters’ lives. A site that didn’t provide a community with online friends, outreach links and chat rooms to discuss these issues would go against the book’s values.”

era//404 began by developing static storyboards for how the site would look and operate, based on conversations with the client, research from notes provided by the author and answers to the Ten Questions survey they ask all clients when embarking on a new web project. During this initial concepting, the author contacted a number of unsigned bands to feature their music on the different sections of the site.

“Charles wanted to be intimately involved in all aspects of the site’s concepting,” said Citarella. “His enthusiasm, talent and feedback played an integral role in the site’s design.”

Since its launch, BeautifulChildren.net has attracted thousands of unique visitors that spend time learning about the novel, talking with other fans in the online chat rooms, signing the guestbook and listening to music.

“We weren’t necessarily surprised that the site would gain traction among the target audience,” said Creative Director, Don Citarella, “though we hadn’t anticipated how quickly it would grow and the number of users that would regularly access the site and share it with friends. The main challenge of sites like these, beyond building a community of users, is to maintain traffic over long periods.”

“Following the initial surge and Beautiful Children becoming a bestseller, Random House wanted to offer the book for free for a three-day period,” said Mike Citarella. “We braced for the bandwidth and monitored the views and downloads as users shared the link with friends.”

When the free offer was over and the dust settled, the bandwidth clocked in just shy of its quota with over 15,000 downloads. The promotion increased awareness through an unprecedented amount of press and enabled book sales to level off during the following weeks. Traffic to the site, which had been tapering off since the book’s release, also continued to hold strong. But how long after publicity by the publisher and free offer promotions could the site maintain these numbers?

Shortly after beginning the site concepting, with the foresight that traffic would decline over time, era//404 approached Charles Bock about creating a viral marketing initiative.

“Almost any site out there incorporates viral marketing of some sort,” said Don Citarella. “Anytime someone browses to a site, they pick up information—good or bad—and react. That, alone, is viral.”

“If they choose to email their friends or family, or mention it in a company meeting or at a family dinner, that’s how the marketing effort spreads.”

The idea was to highlight a specific chapter of the book, in which Cheri Blossom, one of the main characters, interviews for a pornography studio.

“In this section, Mr. Bock’s gift for making the reader feel helplessly vulnerable really shines through,” said Mike Citarella. “You find yourself conflicted between empathy and voyeurism. Bock artfully tears the reader between their own discomfort and curiosity for what happens next. Ultimately, this is the core of the novel.”

“Don [Citarella] and I were talking and he brought up the idea of a tryout video,” Charles said. “Immediately I was against it, because I thought we’d catch too much flack. But we talked about it, and agreed that if we came up with something that made the viewer complicit, something that was unsettling enough to pull a viewer in further, then a video could be a really effective teaser for the website, which itself is a great vehicle for the novel.”

era//404 began by assembling a team whose core competencies would help to fully realize the vision of the viral concept. This involved bringing on members of their Creative Network, including director/editor Greg Stadnik.

“The guys at era//404 were clever enough to tell me I would be working on viral marketing for a book, being published by Random House,” jokes Stadnik, “prior to informing me the video would resemble a porn audition.

Bock interviewed a number of actresses that were interested in playing the role of the young runaway’s first encounter with the adult film industry.

“We lucked out in that Dionne Michelle is an amazing, extremely talented actress, and Greg Stadnik knew exactly what we were going for. We shot the video in about two hours.”

“Charles is quite the character in his own right,” said Stadnik. “He was a pleasure to work with, and was a consummate professional when dealing with Dionne and myself on the set. Dionne is a very talented actress and addressed the subtleties of her role with ease and grace.”

As the challenge was to stimulate the viral marketing surreptitiously, it was important for it to grow on its own, without the intervention of era//404 or the author.

The four-minute interview, titled Landey Audition Video, launched on March 12th under the guise of fictional adult film studio Slinky Fox Video (www.slinkyfoxvideo.com). With only a few minor pushes to public message boards and chat rooms, the developers were careful to not directly correlate the interview with the novel, author or publisher.

“Working with era//404 on this was an amazing and surprisingly easy experience,” said Bock. “I think their implementation of the video — via the design of the Slinky Fox website, the links, and the credits box explaining everything — was ingenious. Through every facet of the process, they continually blew my mind.”

Within a month of its launch, with shared links and views steadily growing, the video was picked up by Gawker (Audience seeks Sex, Gets Book Instead) and AdRants (That Hot Chick is Also a Human Being) and the traffic exploded.

“It was back to monitoring and increasing bandwidth,” said Mike Citarella. “The site exceeded the bandwidth quota, yet again. When faced with the alternative (minimal to no traffic), this is a good problem to have.”

In the four months since the initial launch, said era//404, the server had exceeded bandwidth quotas twice. The initial limit was set at 10GB/month and increased to 50GB during the free download promotion. Upon the launch of the viral video and a second bandwidth outage, the site had to be moved to a dedicated server with a quota of 100GB of bandwidth to allow for the site’s massive amount of traffic.

In his Gawker post, Hamilton Nolan said: “In this competitive publishing environment, you need book promotions that are really HOT…This is truly forward-thinking strategic marketing.”

Steve Hall, of AdRants, said: “We’ve seen a lot of videos used to promote all sorts of things… This is one of the best. One could argue it’s just another trashy sex-sells piece of crap but one would be wrong. The content of the video is directly related to what’s pitched at the end of the video and it’s wonderfully done. This work comes from a category that’s seen an astounding improvement in terms of what it’s done to promote its products over the past few years. It’s like they all woke up one day and realized, damn, there’s more to this advertising thing than small space, black and white newspaper ads.”

“Reactions to the video run the gamut,” says Bock. “People are shocked. They’re creeped out. But it sucks them in. Most of my friends who saw it the first time sent in emails — the first sentence says how disturbing it was, and the second says how brilliant it is. The goal was to get college-aged and post-collegiate males interested in the novel. But we’re also getting a ton of hits from people in the advertising and creative worlds, who check out the video to see just what we’ve done and this crazy world we’ve created.”

According to the site’s statistics software, during the next three days, almost every single major advertising agency in the United States watched the video and continued to the web site. On more than one occasion, agencies spent 1-3+ hours browsing through the site and video content.
The video reignited enthusiasm for the novel and online community created by BeautifulChildren.net and further reaffirms era//404’s beliefs in serving the online audience rich media and innovative ways to appreciate popular culture.

“It’s wonderful to work with clients that are open to new and ground-breaking ideas like BeautifulChildren.net and the viral video,” said Mike Citarella. “When they really embrace the idea that the web can do and be anything they can imagine, take risks and collaborate to explore new ways of promoting their services and businesses, that’s the most exhilarating part of what we do.”

Creative Director, Don Citarella, a guest lecturer with The School of Visual Arts and Communication Arts (Insights 2005) interviewee, consistently promotes the value of viral marketing disguised as irrelevant content. “It used to be a Field of Dreams situation,” said Citarella. “‘If you built it, people would come’. Now, in the competitive online landscape, you have to be more innovative to attract audiences. You target people emotionally—for better or worse—and hope they react. At the very least, if they remember it, you’ve done your job.”

“I would highly recommend others to work with era//404 on viral marketing initiatives,” said Stadnik. “They take a unique approach in using the latest technology, across various platforms, to best achieve both creative and effective results.”

“I honestly could not be happier with era//404 and the work they’ve done for me,” said Bock. “What impressed me most about the process is the fact that these guys are pretty much geniuses at what they do, and at the same time they are patient with people who aren’t exactly internet savvy, and are also open to creative feedback on their work. I can’t imagine working with better, more professional, more excellent people.”

About era//404 Creative Group, Inc.

Established in August 2000, era//404 Creative Group, Inc. is a New York-based design, development and marketing agency. Recent clients include: The Australian Trade Commission, The Arthur Ashe Foundation, Broadway Video, Jonathan Safran Foer, The Herb Ritts Foundation, Sanrio/Hello Kitty and The Target Corporation.

For further information, please contact:
Don Citarella, era//404
www.era404.com

It’s not uncommon to see Mac users living and dying by Apple’s Safari browser that comes built in OS X, but in a surprising bit of news today, PayPal is warning users that they are better off using an alternative if they want to avoid fraud. Just like the average Windows user usually doesn’t bother to download a browser different than Internet Explorer, Safari is commonly the browser of choice for Mac users.

Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean Safari is a bad option, not even an insecure browser, but in the eyes of PayPal it is lacking two important anti-phishing security features that “Internet Explorer 7 or 8 when it comes out, Firefox 2 or Firefox 3, and indeed Opera” already pack in. The two features mentioned by Michael Barrett, PayPal’s chief information security officer, are a built-in phishing filter and an anti-phishing technology, called Extended Validation certificates.

PayPal happens to be in a very unique position for making an educated assessment regarding web security, but we don’t see either of those two technologies making miracles for saving users from fraudsters. That said, we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple implemented them on its browser in a matter of weeks or months, depending on how badly they are demanded by its users. At the end of the day, there is no better anti-phishing filter than yourself, being aware that scammers are out there and they are trying to get you. Just make sure you browse the right sites and follow links where you can trust them.

Extra Tech

Dear Readers (especially those who are bloggers), I want to show you how to get a 100% conversion rate on your website traffic.

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First there was Pay Per Click advertising which pays you on the small percentage of website visitors that actually click on an advertisement.

Now there is “Pay Per Play” advertising that will pay you on 100% of your website traffic… NO CLICKS NECESSARY!

Pay Per Play caters to an audience that is larger than radio, television and print media combined!

Billions of dollars are being spent by big brand advertisers and they are ready to pay you. Will you claim your share of the pie?

Or will you let someone else have it?

To learn more about Pay Per Play visit: http://tinyurl.com/2zvrs9

Honestly -I’m onboard

Google’s Picasa site can show a map sprinkled with thumbnails of a photo album’s pictures.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Readers of this blog will have inferred I’m a fan of geotagging–in fact, I’m trying to label all my photos with the tags that show where the picture was taken, even though the geotagging process is complicated.

I’m betting that much of the value of geotagging lies in the future, for example when I might have a harder time remembering which hike a particular picture came from. But can anything useful be done with those geotagged photos today?

Based on my scrutiny of a handful of sites–Google’s Picasa, Yahoo’s Flickr, SmugMug (the only fee-required site), Locr, and Everytrail–the answer is yes.

But as with other aspects of geotagging, today’s cartographically clever Web sites are likely to appeal chiefly to enthusiasts who have some patience and technical abilities. Just like we’re not at the stage where most cameras can add a location stamp as easily as they can add a timestamp, we’re not yet at the stage where most folks are going to start with an online map when they want to share their photos or reminisce.

Collectively, the sites I checked show the potential of geotagging–but also the rough spots. My top pick is Flickr, with Picasa and SmugMug tied for second place. But each site has different strengths and weaknesses, so look carefully before you make any commitments.

One of the main reasons I picked Flickr as tops is because the Flickr maps interface can sift data better. For example, you can see a high-level view of all your geotagged photos, and you can filter that view with parameters such as your photos, your friends’ or contacts’ photos, anyone’s photos, and most important in my opinion, specific tags. That’s a handy interface when trying to find photos of, say, Yosemite National Park, but you can’t remember which of several trips a particular photo is associated with.

Flickr displays pictures as unevocative pink dots, but the photos themselves are shown on a strip below.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

In contrast, Picasa and SmugMug draw maps that only reflect the contents of a particular group of photos–called galleries at SmugMug, albums at Picasa, and sets at Flickr. (Google Maps can show Picasa images of a particular area to Google account holders who install a Mapplet application, though.)

Flickr also lets you take a set-based view of a map, with a scattering of pink dots representing your pictures. Indeed, it’s probably the most likely way somebody might want to use a map to show off pictures of a recent trip, for example.

SmugMug, though, has what I found to be the slickest geotagging feature out there: fly-through slideshows of a gallery. With this ability, the site automatically shows a gallery’s sequence of photos, displaying thumbnails along the way on a map and a red line connecting them.

It’s a bit rough around the edges–I’m guessing because the technical difficulties of combining external Google Maps data with its own thumbnails–so it can be herky-jerky at times and with missing map elements. And for slideshows, thumbnails are hardly the best way to showcase sweeping vistas. But there’s no question in my mind that the feature imparts a sense of traveling through a place, a sensation that regular slideshows completely lack.

Where Picasa has the edge over Flickr and SmugMug is in showing thumbnails of each image on the map, not just a dot or pushpin, which I like better even though thumbnails can get pretty crowded. It also shows larger pop-up versions than Flickr does. And for people who are geotagging their photos through the Web site, I think Picasa’s interface is the best.

I also like the way Picasa, on an individual photo’s page, includes a map showing where it was taken. But in part that’s because there’s a big panel of verbiage to the right of the screen on which that kind of real estate is available. A more photo-oriented site might not have that space to spare.

SmugMug lets you tour a gallery of photos on a map–a cool if still rough-around-the-edges feature.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

Another major advantage of Flickr is its handling of location privacy–geoprivacy in Flickr parlance. Naturally you might not want to share with the world the location of your living room, and your pernickety aunt might be even touchier. Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield prohibited geotagging of images of a party at his house.

Happily, Flickr lets you set the geoprivacy of each image, though doing so is awkward. I’m glad the Organizr lets me change this setting, but why isn’t there a geoprivacy option in a photo’s privacy settings window or in the map that’s shown when you click the photo?

There are some other options out there that deserve a look. Google’s Panoramio has a reasonable approach to virtual tourism if not necessarily the best interface for storing your photos–it seems like a ripe candidate for some integration with Picasa.

Loc.alalize.us likewise is an entertaining way to browse geotagged photos; it’s a glitzy interface built on top of Flickr photos and Google Maps.

Like Panoramio, Locr, a German company, lets you upload your own photos. Like SmugMug, it’s got a slideshow ability, though its photos are large and its map, a strip on the left edge with pushpin locations, is more an afterthought. That makes for a nicer slideshow than SmugMug’s thumbnails, but there’s not too much of a sense of place to it. And I can’t help thinking when I see sites like Locr, though, that it must be tough building a critical mass of members when there are bigger photo-sharing sites already with major momentum.

For a journey-oriented site Everytrail lets people upload whole GPS track logs and label them with points of interest and photos. It’s also got a handy feature that can show others’ Panoramio pictures. It’s a good way to look at trips people have taken in a particular area.

Locr shows individual photos fine, but doesn’t handle groups with much aplomb.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET Networks)

I found Everytrail’s interface a bit difficult and unintuitive at times, but it does have the advantage of being able to piggyback on Flickr: I successfully imported my bike trip Flickr set into an Everytrail map–though the klunkiness of the process was evident by the fact that I have three copies of each photo, and I can’t figure out how to get rid of the duplicates. Also, when I inadvertently uploaded the wrong day’s track log for a batch of photos, I had a hard time figuring out my error.

In the months that I’ve been trying this out, though, geotagging has been improving. I’m certain that these sites will improve as geotagging photos in the first place gets easier, more people try it, and programmers hammer away at the computational and user-interface challenges.

Another area with potential is software to deal with geotagging on computers. Mostly that’s limited today just to utilities to marry geographic data with image files. But the rudimentary geotagging support in Adobe Systems’ Lightroom and Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5, which both can show a photo’s location on a map, is a harbinger of things to come. Better geotagging abilities on people’s computers will fuel improvements on the Web and vice-versaSource: Extra Tech

This is probably one of the better looking Skype mouse combos we’ve seen so far. It’s also equipped with a 2.5mm earphone jack for “extra privacy”.

This Skype Phone doubles as an 800 DPI optical mouse making this an excellent idea for managing the area around your desk. It also has a built speaker for handsfree skype communication or listening to music.

Features:

• 128×64 pixel LCD screen with backlight
• Hi-Fi Speaker
• Connect with USB to your computer
• 800 DPI optical sensor
• Crystal clear audio with 16bit 48 KHz sampling rate
• Also compatible with Internercalls, SparVoip, NetAppel, poivY
• VoipDiscount, VoipCheap and WebCallDirect, VoipStunt, VoipBuster
• Multi-Language Support
• Supplied Earpones for privacy

The Mouse Skype Phone with 2.5mm Earphone Jack retails for $22.26 (Sample 1+) from the Chinavasion website.

Via geekalerts 

What good is a browser unless you can tweak it, hack it and bend it to your will? No good at all. The more you can hack it, the better it is.

And that means that Firefox must be a great browser. It’s infinitely customizable, via editing a text file called userChrome.css, making changes via a command called about:config, and using free add-ons to extend the features of the browser.

In this article, with those techniques and others, Preston Gralla will show you 15 great Firefox tricks, including how to build your own Firefox search engine, how to speed up your browsing, how to hack the interface and plenty more. So launch your favorite browser, and get ready for some great tricks.

Read 15 must-have Firefox tricks by Preston Gralla

We are proud to announce opening of our new website – Mobile Toys. The site is aimed to provide its users recent up to date news about cell phone/gadget releases and give full access to directory of the cell phones available on the market. All users are free to leave any comments about phones they like/use.

Currently we are gathering affiliate information to provide more details and information about best prices available for the corresponding phones. If you want us to become your affiliate - please contact us via email/skype. Your link will be placed next to each phone in our database as buy here.

I hope you like our initiative and will let us know what else you’d consider to obtain for Mobile Toys

BOSTON (Reuters) - “w00t”, an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary.

It’s like saying “yay”, the dictionary said.

“It could be after a triumph or for no reason at all,” Merriam-Webster said.

Visitors to Merriam-Webster’s Web site were invited to vote for one of 20 words and phrases culled from the most frequently looked-up words on the site and submitted by readers.

Runner-up was “facebook” as a new verb meaning to add someone to a list of friends on the Web site Facebook.com or to search for people on the social networking site.

Merriam-Webster President John Morse said “w00t” reflected the growing use of numeric keyboards to type words.

“People look for self-evident numeral-letter substitutions: 0 for O; 3 for E; 7 for T; and 4 for A,” he said. “This is simply a different and more efficient way of representing the alphabetical character.”

One Web site, www.thinkgeek.com, already sells T-shirts with the word “w00t” printed on the front.

“w00t belongs to gamers the world over. It seems to have been derived from the obsolete ‘whoot’ which essentially is another way to say ‘hoot’ which itself is a shout or derisive laugh,” Think Geek said on its Web site.

“But others maintain that w00t is the sound several players make while jumping like bunnies in Quake III,” it added, referring to a popular video game.

Online gamers often replace numbers and symbols with letters to form what Merriam-Webster calls an “esoteric computer hacker language” known as “l33t speak.” This translates into “leet”, which is short for “elite”.

A separate survey of words used in the media and on the Internet by California-based Global Language Monitor produced a different set of winners on Tuesday. “Hybrid” took top honours as word of the year with “climate change” the top phrase.

Global Language Monitor, which uses an algorithm to track words and phrases in the media and on the Internet, said “hybrid” had broad connotations of “all things green from biodiesel to wearing clothes made of soy to global warming”.

Runner-up was “surge,” based on the “surge” of 30,000 extra U.S. troops deployed to Iraq since mid-June, followed by the word “Bluetooth,” a technology used to connect electronic devices via radio waves.

“The English language is becoming more and more a globalised language every year,” said Global Language Monitor president Paul Payack, noting that this year’s list included words also culled from India, Singapore, China and Australia.

Source: Yahoo! News

SANTA CLARA, Calif. NYT — Twenty-five years ago Steven T. Kirsch built a better mouse. Now he believes he has found a way to create a better trap — for spam, not mice — if he has enough time to finish his project.

An M.I.T.-trained engineer, Mr. Kirsch was frustrated by the quality of the first computer mice in 1982, so he set out to improve them by incorporating an optical sensor.

Since then he has started four companies, all based on his frustrations with existing products or services. He has made forays into word processing document design, accelerating the Web, and in 1997 Infoseek, his search engine company, was the third ranking company in Web search. In many ways Mr. Kirsch, who is 50 years old, has come to exemplify what distinguishes Silicon Valley — a blend of engineering skills with persistent entrepreneurship.

Along the way he has amassed a personal fortune of about $230 million, a success that has permitted him and his wife to become significant philanthropists in Silicon Valley by contributing more than $75 million to the United Way campaign and other causes through his foundation.

Recently he has taken on the challenge of e-mail spam. This year he founded Abaca, a company with a new approach in the crowded market for stopping junk electronic mail.

Abaca claims that it can filter out 99 percent of all spam, and supports the claim with a money-back guarantee. According to the result of an independent survey last February by Opus One, a computer industry consulting firm in Tucson, Ariz., that would be significantly better than the results of six leading spam blockers.

Abaca has taken on a new urgency for Mr. Kirsch — during the summer, he was discovered to have a rare form of blood cancer, Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia, that is found in about 1,500 Americans every year and is considered incurable, although it can be managed beyond the five- to seven-year longevity that new patients are usually told to expect.

So far he has shown no effects from the disease, and he said he is intent on applying his engineer’s approach to the problem.

“This is harder on my wife than it is on me,” he said during a recent interview. “I just look at it as a problem. Here’s a problem and you have four years to solve it or you don’t get to solve any more problems.”

Mr. Kirsch is not the first prominent entrepreneur in Silicon Valley to battle cancer. Andrew S. Grove, the chief executive of Intel, has survived prostate cancer. In May 1996 Mr. Grove wrote about his battle with the disease in intimate detail in a Fortune magazine cover story. More recently Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, also underwent an operation and has survived a rare form of pancreatic cancer.

As he has in confronting his earlier challenges, Mr. Kirsch outlined his situation and what he is doing to try to solve it in great detail on his Web home page. His approach to surviving is outlined in painstaking detail. However, it is listed as the third of his current projects, after “Eliminating spam,” and “Who would make the best president?”

In his description, he writes: “I have enough time to change the outcome and I’m going to try to do that. This is my story.”

His perspective on his disease is also clear. Fourth on his list is “Why human beings will be extinct in 90 years.” He writes, “My incurable blood cancer is minor compared to what is happening with the planet. We have somewhat more than 90 years before humanity is virtually extinct.”

Once a registered Republican, Mr. Kirsch has moved closer to Democratic candidates and was a significant backer of Al Gore, in particular because of his environmental stance.

“He’s done a lot of fund-raising and he’s really been willing to put himself out there,” said John Shoch, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. “He says what he believes in and supports political causes, and he’s not bashful about getting into the fray.”

The most visible change that he has made as a result of his cancer is the recent decision to change the financing direction of the Steven and Michele Kirsch Foundation, which until late last month had focused on a wide range of community philanthropic goals.

At the end of October, however, the foundation announced that in the future it would focus its financing on research associated with his cancer, which because of its rare nature receives almost no federal money.

For the moment, between weekly visits to the Stanford Medical Center, Mr. Kirsch is continuing to put much of his time into persuading the world that he has stumbled on a better way to block spam.

He has been thinking about the spam problem for a number of years and has several patents covering other approaches, but Mr. Kirsch said he had hit on the idea underlying Abaca — profiling the recipient of e-mail rather than the sender — quite by accident.

“We were sitting around thinking of ways to obfuscate the description about how our system worked so the spammers would be misdirected,” he said. “So I came up with receiver reputation as something that might sound plausible. Then as I thought about it more and more, the more sense it made to me.”

The approach underlying the Abaca technique is the recognition that the ratio of spam to legitimate e-mail is individually unique. It is also a singular identifier that a spammer cannot manipulate easily. By assessing the combined reputations of the recipients of any individual message, the Abaca system determines the “spaminess” of a particular message. Mr. Kirsch asserts this provides a high degree of accuracy in deciding whether the message is spam.

Unlike most of its competitors, he said, Abaca’s technology does not require a training period, is language independent and is faster than many competitors because it does not scan the entire contents of a message to determine whether it is spam.

Mr. Kirsch has invested about $5 million in developing his idea, and he said he expects Abaca to reach profitability by the middle of next year.

“I have to admit it sounds innovative and novel,” said Sunil Paul, the founder of Brightmail, one of the leading providers of antispam technology, which was sold to Symantec in 1997 for $370 million.

At the same time Mr. Paul is dubious about the ability of a stand-alone antispam company in today’s computer security market. “Remember Bill Gate’s promise to rid the Internet of spam in a few years?” he said. “That was over seven years ago. Once any of these solutions scale up, though, thousands of other clever, smart people start to work on how to defeat the system.”

Mr. Kirsch insists that Abaca is unlikely to be caught soon. “Most people like me get 99.8 percent or so with the current volume of users,” he said, referring to the percentage of good e-mail he now sees using his system. “Our performance gets better as we add more users; our competitors already have scale, and we are way ahead even with just 20,000 users. When we get to scale, our performance should be nearly 100 times better than our closest competitor.”

In February, Opus One tested six antispam products on a stream of 10,000 messages during a 10-day period. Spam catch rates ranged from a high of 97.36 percent to a low of 74.10 percent. “At 99.8 percent you miss two out of 1000,” said Mr. Kirsch. “At 95 percent you miss 50 out of 1,000. So other systems give you 25 times as much spam. Who wants that? Nobody we know.”

Opus One has not yet tested the Abaca system. However, the testing group has been briefed by a representative of Abaca. “Generally, I am very skeptical of antispam techniques that get put forth with the pseudo-math that you hear from Abaca,” said Joel M. Snyder, a senior partner with Opus One. “In their case, however, the math has a face validity that’s unusual in this business. The only obvious issue with their system is that it really requires a lot of participants in order to work.”

Source: New York Times

“In an unprecedented move, Google Inc has agreed to supply the IP address of an Israeli blogger who used ‘Google Blogger’ for a blog in which he slandered Shaarei Tikva council members running for reelection. The election is being held today,” reports Israel’s Globes Online newspaper.

For more than a year, the anonymous blogger slandered three Shaarei Tikva councilmen: local council chairman Gideon Idan, Shaarei Tikva director general Haim Blumenfeld and council member Avi Yokobovich. The blogger accused the men of criminal acts, such as pretending to be handicapped in order to receive discounts on local property taxes, receiving bribes from a contractor, and having ties to criminal gangs.

The councilmen eventually sued the blogger and “also asked for a court order ordering Google to disclose the blogger’s IP address”. Judge Oren Schwartz said that the blog’s content raised suspicions of criminal conduct. The paper says:

Google initially said that disclosing the blogger’s identity violated rulings on the balance between freedom of expression and a person’s right to his reputation.

In other words, freedom of speech does not include the right to slander…..

There’s a discussion at Slashdot.