Open The Dialogue

Wednesday night I had the distinct pleasure to meet up with some of the best and brightest in the blogging community. Some are native Chicagoans and others were in town for a Ragen Communications conference. Despite the fact that the original location I had chosen, which was just down the street from the hotel many of them were staying at, wound up being closed we found an alternate location. It was a lot of fun to sit around a table with a stuffed pizza and geek out with others who are on the forefront of the new media landscape. It’s always nice to meet some of the people who I have gotten to know virtually via blog comments, links and emails. Kevin Dugan, Robert Scoble, David Armano; Jeremiah Owyang, Jeffrey Treem, Joe Thornley and others came in and out over the course of a couple hours. As Jeremiah says in his write-up of the get together, you could tell this was a solid bunch of guys because there was far more money left by those of us who had to duck out early than was needed for the check. It’s also exposed me to a bunch of new blogs to subscribe to in order to follow what these guys are talking about. Absolutely a great time.

A bunch of goofy characters get together for a good cause, to promote net neutrality.

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If you find yourself just not having enough blogs or RSS feeds to read, both Mack Collier at BMA and David Armano at Logic+Emotion have round-ups of highlights from existing blogs or pointers to new blogs that have launched. Get your RSS readers ready and carve out a few more minutes in your day to keep up with these great outside-the-mainstream voices.

On Wednesday night, our friends at photo-sharing site Flickr are having some storage issues, and the site’s been down for a bit. Instead of going dark, they’ve got a blog entry in place detailing what is going on, and have set up a nifty contest (click image) to give you something to do to soothe your addiction while this is happening.

*Gasp!* An online company suggested people do something in the real world? Yep, and set up a contest that will cost them – well, sans the advertising click-throughs that they’re not getting – about $24.95, the value of a Flickr Pro account.

This isn’t the be-all, end-all for any company facing an issue like this, but based on the early returns from the people tracking back to Flickr’s blog, I’d say that the photo addicts enthusiasts that frequent the pages there are pleased.

WAY back in 2004, Microsoft’s Bill Gates stated that spam would “be solved” by 2006. Well, It’s 2006, and while my inbox(es) have done a much better job of sorting (it’s not perfect by any means) spam from real mail, have we “solved” the spam problem by filtering at the user level? I’d say not.

The screenshot to the right is the left sidebar of my gmail account, which houses a good portion of my blog-related email, and the number next to the “Spam” title is the number of spam threads (note that some of those spams have two, three, four or more messages of the same type from the same sender) that I have received since 12:00am Eastern time Sunday, May 28. Solved? I think not. One executive, Jan Hruska, former CEO of Sophos, told ZDNet Asia’s Vivian Yeo a few weeks back that even two years from now we won’t see the end of spam, the way things are going.

I don’t know about you, but howabout we all cut the pronouncements and come up with something that works? That isn’t to say that people are sitting around on their hands, but when statistics by one group are showing 71% of all email sent being spam during the first quarter of 2006, something’s not right, is it? Especially when that was up four percentage points from the end of 2006.