Selective disConnectvity

Mindful Disconnection: Counterpowering the Panopticon from the Inside by Howard Rheingold and Eric Kluitenberg in Skor.nl challenges the "unquestioned connectivity" of the Internets and propose a possible alternative they call ‘mindful disconnection’, or rather the ‘art of selective disconnectivity’. Some excerpts I found relevant:

"We are not as convinced as others that technology is only, primarily, or necessarily a dangerous toxin. There is a danger in locating technologies' malignancies in the tools themselves rather than the way people use them (...) Perhaps tools, methods, motivations, and opportunities for making the choice to disconnect – and perceiving the value of disconnecting in ways of our choosing – might be worth considering as a response to the web of info-tech that both extends and ensnares us. (...) In a world of prevailing disconnectivity, to be able to connect is a privilege (e.g., the ‘digital divide). In a world of always-on connectivity, this relation might very well be reversed and the real privilege could then be the ability to withdraw and disconnect – to find sanctuary from eternal coercion to communicate, to connect, or to be traceable."

The article ends with a nice list about the "Art and Science of Selective disConnectvity".

Why do I blog this? disconnectivity is a topic that I am remotely interested in, rather as a personal feeling about technologies than a research field.

This said, there might certainly be a need for a "disconnection literacy", a concept closed to the "information literacy" and learning how to eat properly. The point would be to reach a balance between the connected and the isconnected status to ponder the information overload/attention disruptions.

Furthermore, what they describe in this article can even go beyond technological connectivity... I take jokes such as Isolatr very seriously: our world values connection so much that it's not only connection to devices but also connections to people that are important. The word "serendipity" is now everywhere, what's next: a renaissance of the misanthropes?

Notes from Frontiers in Interaction

My notes from Frontiers in Interaction in Milano, an italian event about user experience/interaction design that focused on the Internet of Things as well as Virtual Environments. Thanks Leandro Agro and Matteo Penzo for the invitation! Fabio Sergio: "designing for the segment of one"

Fabio described the cell phone as the "personal remote control for life", which is contradictory with the fact that cell phones have the same shell (hardware, physical appearance) and the same ghost (software). Obviously, this does not reflect the specific needs people have. At the same time, function fatigue is the number one complain of cell phone users (Source: forum to advance the mobile experience). As Don Norman said, "we want simplicity but we don't want to give up any of the cool futures", hence the myth of simplicity.

Fabio then described how the area should rather aim at simplicity, not simplification. To do so, he got back to the shell/ghost metaphor by proposing the following:

Shell: hardware is hard but it's getting softer, as attested by some examples: Schulze&Webb' metal phone, rapid manufacturing by Patrick Jouin, "3D software for the masses" (see this announcement for that matter). According to him, a near future path would be the 3D printing of your own shell ("to match the color of your shoes" as Fabio put on the slide). A last example he showed is Panoko, an emergent marketplace for 3D printing.

Ghost: there are some steps towards the direction of software personalization with Jaiku or MySocial Fabric or the advent of a widget-based model. Another important domain would also correspond to the "one field that rule them all" model: the google field search is indeed presented by Fabio as a relevant style of interaction (which claims is supported by a recent paper by Don Norman). There are already examples of this trend but ,as Fabio pointed out, it's still lacking "Magic".

Rafi Haladjian

This talk was a worthwhile and compelling account of the Nabaztag creation. As a minitel and internet pioneer, he was convinced by the idea of ubiquitous computing, he and his team wondered about "how to get there from here" (a recurring question for people interested in the future ;) ). His point was that "there is life beyond CES". Deploying what he called a "teddy bear theory", they aimed at improving devices following the basic process: mechanical/functional (classic teddy bear or scale) to digital (singing teddy bear or enhanced scale) to connected.

The next question for them was then "where to start"? This is where he explained why they chose the rabbit as a prototype of an ubiquitous computing artifact. Some reasons: - there was a rabbit on his desk at that moment, when they were brainstorming. - it's a message to show people that it's possible: if you can connect a rabbit on the internet, then you can connect anything. - it's not utilitarian, and people won't have high expectations. - a rabbit can be the "Pong" of ubicomp - it's cute

They had 3 ambitions with this project: - popularizing the idea that there is a life after the PC: the world is not reduced to a screen. - experimenting screenless ways to provide information (sound, light, movements but not in a "new age" way) - bringing virtual worlds to the real life: a physical avatar.

The challenges were not so simple, the point was to start facing the real life challenges of ambient devices: how do you live with a screenless one button-device? how to face the complexity of un-interactiveness? how to manage serendipity? There were also important technical design challenges (local/networked). Moreover it was also challenging to see how existing information could be used.

Rafi Haladjian highlighted the importance of bottom-up innovation in their project: as he said "we don't want to invent the life of people", therefore their approach was to to sell this connected rabbit and see what emerges: how would people invent the "Internet of Things"? (And people said "Wow" as he expressed). Violet's strategy is to empower people by making things they can play with.

The next big thing after the release of the Nabaztag/tag will be in september: Nabaztamps, RFID stamps that one can put on objects to track certain activities (or to let people imagine new applications):

Jeffrey Schnapp I took less notes here but I was impressed by how he described successful innovation as a "tradition of productive failure, failed interaction and failed immersion", which he exemplified by virtual reality examples that aimed at replacing the physical. Another hint from him that I liked (and that resonated with my talk) was the aim of "replacing total immersion, total interaction and reality replacement paradigms with partial, distracted play-based paradigms that exploit and interconnect the specificities and experiential potentialities of physical and digital things".

I was also interested in talks by Alexandro Valli (io agency), Teresa Colombi (LudoTIC, she presented an insightful study of eye-tracking device employed to analyse the UX of WoW) and Francesco Cara although they were in italian. Valli described three interesting ideas: - how "digital does not exist" but is only a form of representation, the digital being an enabler of possibilities. - the importance of being "cold" - simplicity as the ultimate sophistication (Leonardo da Vinci).

Shared map anotations

Seen in Milano this morning, some annotations shared on the metro map.

Frontiers in interaction talk

Currently at Frontiers in Interaction in Milano where I gave a talk entitled "PeopleSpaceThings: hybridization over the internets" (Slide can be found here).

The talk was basically a critique of assumptions in ubiquitous computing, relying on current literature (Bell and Dourish, Graham, etc.) and show how some alternatives could be possible, mostly projects that I am doing with Julian and things I like (Jaiku, Isolatr).

Cooperation between designers, engineers and scientists in HCI

Bartneck, C. & Rauterberg, M. (2007). HCI reality—an ‘Unreal Tournament’?, Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 65 (2007) 737–743. This article addresses the cooperation between designers, engineers and scientists in the HCI community. It reports the results from an empirical study about the barriers between these professions. The authors describe these barries using the term "Unreal Tournament" because of the "shouting match between academics and practitioners" between researchers in some conferences.

The description of the barriers is quite insightful:

"Barrier 1: Engineers {E} and scientists {S} make their results explicit by publishing in journals, books and conference proceedings, or by acquiring patents. Their body of knowledge is externalized and described outside of the individual engineer or scientist. These two communities revise their published results through discussion and control tests among peers. On the other hand, designers’{D} results are mainly represented by their concrete designs. (...) Barrier 2: Engineers {E} and designers {D} transform the world into preferred situations, while scientists {S} mainly attempt to understand the world through the pursuit of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws. (...) Barrier 3: Scientists {S} and designers {D} are predominantly interested in humans in their role as possible users. Designers are interested in human values, which they transform into requirements and eventually solutions. Scientists in the HCI community are typically associated with the social or cognitive sciences. (...) Engineers {E} are mainly interested in technology, which includes software for interactive systems."

Then the study also offers some pertinent results (summarized in two words below but I encourage reader to look more closely at the paper):

"Scientists, with their logical positivistic paradigm on the one side, and engineers and designers with their constructivistic paradigm on the other side, appear to have different attitudes toward REALITY. Our study attempted to find empirical proof of this difference. (...) Interestingly, among the three professions, engineers appear to be the cohesive element, since they often have dual backgrounds, whereas very few participants had dual science/design backgrounds. Engineers could, therefore, build a bridge between designers and scientists, and through their integrative role, could guide the HCI community to realizing its full potential."

Why do I blog this? articles about how a field such as HCI is organized are always interesting to understand the underlying dynamic in research communities. Although what is described there (and that I have put the emphasis on) is a bit stereotypical, lots of things are true and can be relevant to get what is at stake.

The materiality of networked cities

Stephen Graham, in his essay entitled "Strategies for Networked Cities" has some very convincing arguments against supporters of "ICT-based end of city visions" who ignore the very material realities that make the supposedly “virtual” realms of “cyberspace” possible:

"in their obsession with the ethereal worlds of cyberspace – with the blizzards of electrons, photons, and bits and bytes on screens – end of city commentators have consistently ignored the fact that it is real wires, real fibers, real ducts, real leeways, real satellite stations, real mobile towers, real web servers, and – not to be ignored – real electricity systems that make all of this possible. All these are physically embedded and located in real places. They are expensive. They are profoundly material. (...) Because the material bases for cyberspace are usually invisible they tend only to be noticed when they collapse or fail through wars, terrorist attack, natural disasters, or technical failure."

Why do I blog this? some good points there to keep in mind when designing ubiquitous computing applications (which need electricity, access to a network, etc.), material to be quoted in presentations to come.

Twitter-like device from 1930?

Location-based microblogging in the 30s: this "robotic" messenger display aims at "TO AID persons who wish to make or cancel appointments or inform friends of their whereabout":

Why do I blog this? definitely not twitter but somewhat related to the same practice of sharing micro-content. It did not seem to take off though.

Intel Ubifit Garden

Eric Savitz, in an article about Intel in Barrons describe the Intel Ubifit Garden:

"Intel built a device roughly the size of a pager that contains a variety of digital sensors, including a thermometer, a barometer, a 3-axis accelerometer, a microphone, a digital compass and sensors for humidity and for visible and infrared light. Worn on your collar or belt, the device then tracks all of your physical activity during the day. Based on the sensor data, plus some special algorithms, it can apparently tell when you are standing around doing nothing and when you are walking, running, biking or doing other physical tasks. The data are then sent wirelessly to your cellphone, which displays -- I am not making this up -- a bunch of digital flowers. The more activity you engage in, the more your digital flowers grow."

Why do I blog this? another example of a ubicomp lifelogging device, what I am curious about here is how this whole range of sensor is employed, how do they turn this constant flow of information (temperature? pression? microphone?) into something meaningful. The underlying question being: how a huge mess is transformed into a relevant summary of the situation (for the user)?

Besides, the article describes some examples of the Intel Day 2007, have a look also on the company website (e-Madrasas in Morocco, new models of time in mobile situations, portable navigation devices that would automatically aligning the displayed map with the real world, etc.), some intriguing stuff there.

Protected source of electricity

Had to deal with that yesterday in a french train:

A protected source of electricity... that prevented me to use an electrically-powered of some sort that I often employ in train for my work.

Is it because they do not want to provide electricity for commuters/travellers? In this case no, because there are power plugs elsewhere in the train. Simply, as I've been told there by the controller, this plug is covered because it's a 380V and they don't want kids/people to toy around with so much electricity (so why is it written 230V????).

Mike Kuniasvky on ubicomp

Some snippets from an interview of Mike Kuniavsky (by Tamara Ardlin) on UX Pioneers:

"TA: Were there products that came out during that time that you thought were especially cool or especially bad?

MK: There were a ton of bad products. There were refrigerators with built in tablet PCs, which are totally useless. At this point all of the internet appliances that had come out — which were essentially dedicated web browsers in a box — and the uselessness of all of those things — was an important lesson. There were all of these different things people were trying. Then there were things that were interesting. Ambient devices like the ambient orb came out around the time I started looking at all of this stuff. That was a very interesting device.

TA: I’ve taken a lot of your time, but I have one more question for you. What really fascinates you the most now? What do you think is going to drive your next five years?

MK: The fact that information processing is dying to be treated by product designers and industrial designers as a kind of "material," and that these people are including it into their devices as a kind of material. What used to be robotics is now showing up as a line item in a design object, like rubber. That is a profound shift in peoples’ relationship to what computers are and what they can do and where they can do it. "

Why do I blog this? interesting content there about ideas that I share (... it's always refreshing to see some resonances elsewhere!).

Pet computing review

Working on a paper about new interaction partners, I tried to categorize the work done in what can be called "pet computing", i.e. the idea that "traditional human-machine interfaces and their advantages can be extended to other living beings. In order to provide them comfort and also to enhance human-animal communication interaction " as described in Savage, J., Sanchez-Guzmán Walterio Mayol, R.A., Arce, L., Hernandez, A., Brier, L., Martinez, F., Velazquez, A. & Lopez, G. (2000). Animal-Machine Interfaces, Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers, 191. So, based on a review of the existing literature and concrete projects, I came up with 4 categories:

Pet-machine interaction This category is a pure "design for pet" topic: lots of products are explicitly designed for a pet target group: toys, DVDs but it also corresponds to animals playing video games or art projects such as "Augmented Animals" by Auger-Loizeau. The Wonderful Shot Dog Camera by Takara Tomy is also a device that allows pets to take photos themselves. Cricket robots are also part of this augmented animal domain.

(Pictures: left is a pif playing a video game with its snout, right is the dog camera)

Pets and their humans Here it's much rather about technologies for the owner: generally those products or services aim at tracking the pet (location-tracking) or allowing meetings between pets or owners (social software for animals... which are generally targeted to the owners). Generally, these systems are direct translations of the values and concerns humans shared about them to pets: tracking loved ones and improving sociability/encounters/meetings. Examples: there is a huge number of patents and papers about pet trackers (my favorite is Float-a-pet), some social software like Dogster (for dog owners) are also trendy.

Although, this is less about pet-to-pet interaction, a system such as pet palio (basically a matchmaking website for pets) falls in this category given the need to have a human to interact with the website.

Control pet Military menagerie is a also a lively domain in which people aim at bending animals to their will so that they could move them around, spy or attack. No comment about the ethic of such purposes.

Renewed interactions between pets and humans What I put in that category is all the projects that aim at creating new relationships between pets and their owners. This is where the innovation should and will happen, and where Julian and I are doing our investigations. Unfortunately, there are only few projects here: - feline fun park, a phidget cat toy which interacts with a cat for hours of feline fun. It detects cat interaction and reacts accordingly to keep the cat playing. - SNIF: a system that allows pet owners to interact through their pets' social networks. - Poultry Internet, that allows people to touch/hug their pets remotely and have a feeling of presence. - animal-controlled video-game: pacman game in which a human play against real crickets.

What is important here is that these projects often differs depending on the level of awareness the pet might have about its involvement in an interaction, which is often the problem here.

(Pictures: left is the feline fun park, right is poultry internet)

Virtual pets That one is more a side-note because it's not strictly speaking related to pet computing, given that Webkinz, V-Migo or Nintendogs are more tamagotchi-like projects.

Some perspectives on urban computing

Dourish, P., Anderson, K., & Nafus, D. (2007) Cultural Mobilities: Diversity and Agency in Urban Computing, Proc. IFIP Conf. Human-Computer Interaction INTERACT 2007 (Rio De Janiero, Brazil). This article is a comprehensive critique of mobile computing in the city that has been construed quite narrowly. the authors criticized urban computing applications, and the underlying vision of urban and mobility they convey. Some excerpts:

"The narrowness of both the site and “the users,” we will argue, has meant that mobile and urban computing have been driven by two primary considerations. The first is how to “mobilize” static applications (...) The second is how to provide people with access to resources in unfamiliar spaces, the “where am I?” approach, as manifested in context-aware applications (...) While these applications clearly meet needs, they fail to take the urban environment on its own terms; they are based on the idea that urban life is inherently problematic, something to be overcome, in comparison to the conventional desktop computing scenario."

The view on mobility they propose is oriented by 3 principles that can help opening up the design space for urban computing: (1) Mobility takes many forms (different type of journey, different means of transport) (2) Movement in space is more than going from A to B (3) People move individually but collectively produce flows of people/goods, etc. that serve to structure and organize space

As described in the conclusion:

"To that end, our criticisms of much (certainly not all) of conventional urban applications of ubiquitous computing are that, first, they construe the city as a site for consumption, organizing it in terms of available resources; second, that they reflect only very narrowly the breadth of urban experience, focusing on particular social groups (generally young and affluent); third, that they focus on individual experience and interaction, rather than helping people connect and respond to the larger cultural patterns and urban flows within which they are enmeshed. "

They also present 4 areas of research into mobile computing: mobility as a disconnection (i.e. how to get a mobile access to information), the problem of dislocation (i.e. wayfinding and resource location), disruption (i.e. how context-sensitivity might provide contextualized service/filter) and locative media. While the first three categories focus on "mobility as a problem", locative media is more appealing to them because it takes "mobility as an opportunity".

Why do I blog this? This is the sort of remarks/principles that I like being expressed because it resonates a lot with my own thoughts about urban/mobile computing, and the underlying issues propelled by designers of these applications.

Braille graffiti

Lately, I've been amazed by the street art work of dwaesha, especially these "Braille Graffiti" (2005):

Why do I blog this? I already dealt with podotactility here, in this example, things are different (although it looks like vertical podotactiles). What is intriguing is the idea of touching graffitis... Remember something? Very curious practice indeed, but still.

Software-sorted geographies

Graham, S.D.N (2005). Software-sorted geographies, Progress in Human Geography29, 5 (2005) pp. 1–19. The central claim of the paper is that computerized systems act as "ordinary" mediators through which people encounter the world, hence the term "software sorting":

"Software-sorting is the means through which such selective access is organized (Graham and Wood, 2003). Such processes operate through a vast universe of what Michel Callon (1986) has termed ‘obligatory passage points’. These are particular topological spaces within sociotechnical systems through which actors have to ‘pass’in order that the system actually functions in the way that dominant actors desire. (...) Crucially, however, the links between software-sorting and geographical inequalities are inherently complex, ambivalent and ambiguous. (...) While they are inherently multitudinous, diverse and ambivalent, and operate at multiple scales, the predominant dynamic of contemporary software-sorting innovations seems to be linked closely to the elaboration of neoliberal models of state construction and service provision"

What I also strikingly interesting for my interest in this paper is this:

"attention has turned away from discussions suggesting that such technologies offer access to some ‘virtual’ domain which is somehow distinct and separable, in some binary way, from the ‘real’spaces and places of cities and material urban life (Woolgar, 2002). In their place, much more nuanced and sophisticated approaches are emerging. These stress that new technologies are intimately involved in the fine-grained and subtle transformations, or ‘remediations’, of place- and space-based social worlds (Bolter and Grusin, 2000; Haythornwaite and Wellman, 2002; Graham, 2004a; 2004b). Far from being separated domains, then, such perspectives underline that the coded worlds of the ‘virtual’ actually work to continually constitute, structure and facilitate the place-based practices of the material world (Dodge and Kitchin, 2004: 198). Castells (1996: 373) calls this the shift from ‘virtual reality’to ‘real virtuality’(see Dodge and Kitchin, 2004)."

And I also liked that one:

"In addressing this wide research, policy and activist agenda, the challenge is to maintain a critical and informed position without falling foul of dystopian and absolutist scenarios suggesting that software-sorting techniques are somehow limitless, completely integrated, and all-powerful. As Koskella (2003) suggests, ‘urban space will always remain less knowable and, thus, less controllable than the restricted panoptic space’"

... given that technologies are not seamless and perfectly working, software-sorted geographies can fail.

Why do I blog this? lots of reading lately from the geography field, certainly because I discovered how that domain address ubiquitous computing from a very relevant angle.

Numeric identity tagged on walls

Kids compulsively tagging their zip code in other cities.

I could have taken other examples but I quite liked that one: 1026 is from a village in the countryside close to Lausanne (which is ranging from 1000-1007, 1010-1012, 1014-1015 & 1017-1018). The use of "zip code" tagged on walls is a recurring practice in occidental cities, often showing how people express their (local) identity, using a very formal identity: the zip code fixed by the State.

An intriguing example of a spatial practice, generally done by teenagers exploring Cities and feeling the need to express their feelings.

'User of what?' one tends to wonder

Reading (again) Lefebvre this week-end, I ran across this quote about the notion of "user" that I liked:

"Let us now turn our attention to the space of those who are referred to by means of such clumsy and pejorative labels as 'users' and 'inhabitants'. No well-defined terms with clear connotations have been found to designate these groups. Their marginalization by spatial practice thus extends even to language. The word 'user' (usager), for example, has something vague - and vaguely suspect - about it. 'User of what?' one tends to wonder. Clothes and cars are used (and wear out), just as houses are. But what is use value when set alongside exchange and its corollaries? As for 'inhabitants', the word designates everyone - and no one. (...) The user's space is lived - not represented (or conceived). When compared with the abstract space of the experts (architects, urbanists, planners), the space of the everyday activities of users is a concrete one, which is to say, subjective. As a space of 'subjects' rather than of calculations, as a representational space, it has an origin, and that origin is childhood, with its hardships, its achievements and its lacks."

Why do I blog this? I know that challenging the notion of "user" is now more and more common, but still it's relevant to see how thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre questionned it.

Signs

mmmh? NO... OK...

Snippets from The Economist on tech failures

Some of the bits I was interested in, featured in last week edition of The Economist's technology quarterly:Radio silence, about what happened to RIFD, once hailed as a breakthrough that would revolutionise logistics:

" it was not surprising that RFID was widely regarded by many in technology as the “next big thing”. RFID was reassuringly coupled to the solid, real-world economy, rather than to dotcom intangibles such as “eyeballs” and “mindshare” (...) Despite such predictions, however, RFID has not lived up to expectations (...) What went wrong? Aside from the over-optimism common to many new technologies and the concerns of privacy activists, RFID did badly for two reasons. The first was that a veritable Babel of incompatible standards grew up. (...) And standards do not solve everything: RFID, like any other technology, is subject to the laws of physics. Metals and liquids can cause interference that prevents tags from being read properly in some situations. (...) It is not just technical concerns that have hindered the deployment of RFID. A more fundamental obstacle is the lack of a clear business case. "

Are you talking to me? is a short overview of where we stand regarding speech recognition applications. This excerpts stroke me as fascinating:

"“People have a lot of negative perceptions of speech technology, because the speech systems deployed first were pretty bad,” says Mr Hong. Mr Castro agrees. “There's a history of disappointment and failed expectations,” he says. When setting up his firm, he presented his idea to some venture capitalists. They were impressed by the technology but were put off by the term “voice recognition” which, like “artificial intelligence”, is associated with systems that have all too often failed to live up to their promises."

Why do I blog this? as usual, the E is a very compelling resource that describe why promises haven't been reached. It's interesting to see the parallels between different innovation that are presented in the tech quarterly, the common thread about failures and expectations. Besides, the article written by Bruno about Jan Chipchase and Stefana Broadbent is also very informative, describing some relevant cases about certain technologies are employed by beyond-occidental-white-users.

Ambivalence in pop culture’s treatment of technoscience

Reading "Follow for Now: Interviews with Friends and Heroes" while scouting for LIFT speakers, I was struck by this quote from Eugene Thacker (the interview is available here):

"these sciences and technologies are normalized in a way that the general public going to a film will “accept” their inclusion as a matter of course. Certainly there are always SF geeks who dispute the technical accuracy of how the genetic mutation actually creates the superhero or villain, but on a general level these technosciences have become a part of a certain cultural imaginary. So the question is “What conditions had to be in place such that these particular technosciences could become normalized as a part of a certain world-view?” Perhaps this process is somewhat parallel to the normalization of medicine and public health practices themselves.

So I think that popular culture is relevant, not because I believe that films should educate and moralize, but because there is actually a great deal of ambivalence in pop culture’s treatment of technoscience. We can’t live without it, and yet it seems to be our downfall. The movies that moralize about the ineradicable human spirit do so using the most advanced computer graphics and special effects. There’s also a sense in many of these films, books, and comics that we as a culture are not quite sure what to do with all of this information and all these gadgets. It’s almost as if the greatest challenge posed to SF now is finding something interesting to do with all the technology that exists."

Why do I blog this? because this is one of these questions that keeps me awake at night after a daily dose of "pop culture’s treatment of technoscience". As a user experience researcher, working with designers, engineers (both from academia and companies), I am concerned by this normalization and how to take other paths, other fringes (that's actually the near-future laboratory/liftlab's concern)

600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra

Not that I am really interested by research&dev about spam filtering, but this American Scientist article by Brian Hayes is quite interesting from a cultural point of view. It basically describes spam as a social and economic phenomenon rather than a technological one and take an an immunological metaphor to explain it ("where the contest is between a host organism and pathogens or parasites, and where both sides have to adapt and evolve in order to survive").

"If e-mail containing the word "Viagra" is blocked, there are other ways of getting the idea across, including synonyms and circumlocutions ("sildenafil citrate," "impotence meds," "the little blue pill"). An adaptive filter will soon flag these terms as well, but by then the spammer can move on to other options. For some kinds of variation—such as obfuscatory misspelling along the lines of "V1@gra"—computational methods could automate the generation of random variants. (...) So how many ways can you spell Viagra? The question is addressed directly by an amusing Web page, created by Rob Cockerham of Sacramento, whose title announces: "There are 600,426,974,379,824,381,952 ways to spell Viagra." (...) When I first noticed spam with aberrant spellings, I assumed that someone out there in the murky world of spam service providers had written a program to generate random variants (...) I still suspect that such random-spelling generators exist in the spam world, but the evidence of my own inbox suggests they are not widely used. The telltale mark of their use would be a peculiar abundance of hapax legomena—the lit-crit term for words that appear only once in a corpus"

Why do I blog this? cultural aspects of "teh web".