Top Ten Reasons to Oppose a GLI Page 8 of 8 (Back to page 1)

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"Note that scholars no longer need think tanks to take their ideas to larger audiences. The think tank sector has yet to absorb the import of this fact. Could Google -- and not universities -- be the real competitor to policy think tanks?"
-- Tyler Cowen, "The debate over think tanks"
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"Nearly everyone who uses e-mail has received unsolicited commercial messages at one time or another. These e-mails,
often referred to as 'spam,' are an irritating fact of life for people who use the Internet to communicate with friends,
do research, or purchase goods and services on line. In Washington State, the number one consumer complaint
reported over the last 2 years is spam. On average our office receives between 1,000 - 1,600 spam complaints per month."
-- Attorney General Office

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"Spamming is commonly defined as the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mail - that is, email that was not asked for (unsolicited) and received by multiple recipients (bulk). A further common definition of spam restricts it to unsolicited 'commercial' e-mail, a definition that does not consider non-commercial solicitations such as political or religious pitches, even if unsolicited, as spam.

"Spamdexing (a portmanteau of spamming and indexing) refers to the practice on the World Wide Web of deliberately modifying HTML pages to increase the chance of them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. People who do this are called search engine spammers. In layman's terms, spamdexing is using unethical means known as "black hat seo techniques" to unfairly increase the rank of sites in search engines. When a website is optimized to be indexable by a search engine, without
trying to deceive its web crawler, this is called search engine
optimization. To be sure, there is much gray area between white-hat search engine optimization and black-hat spamdexing.

"Many of the products advertised in spam are fraudulent in nature, such as quack medications and get-rich-quick schemes.

"One of the most common ad spams is the computer software program GAIN. Also known as Gator or Claria or Dashbar, this insidious program hides itself within the active programs running on your computer and will collect information on internet habits. Based on the websites you visit, it will then send you "relevant" advertising at random intervals.
-- Wikipedia

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"'Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.' -
George Orwell, quoted in Angela Partington, 'The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations', 1992, New York: Oxford University Press, p. 501." |

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Thus finally, an expert from Orwell's "Animal Farm" updated for the blogosphere:

And now, online bloggers, I will tell you about my dream of last night. I cannot describe that dream to you. It was a dream of the earth as it will be when the real world has vanished. But it reminded me of something that I had long forgotten. Many years ago, when I was a little blogger, my mother and the other women used to sing an old song of which they knew only the tune and the first three words. I had known that tune in my infancy, but it had long since passed out of my mind. Last night, however, it came back to me in my dream. And what is more, the words of the song also came back-words, I am certain, which were sung by the bloggers of long ago and have been lost to memory for generations. I will sing you that song now, bloggers. I am old and my voice is hoarse, but when I have taught you the tune, you can sing it better for yourselves. It is called Bloggers of Blogosphere." Old Blogger cleared his throat and began to sing. As he had said, his voice was hoarse, but he sang well enough, and it was a stirring tune, something between The Rolling Stone's "I Can't Get no Satisfaction" and AC/DC's "Highway to Hell." The words ran: Bloggers of the Blogosphere, Hearken to my joyful tidings Of the golden future time. Soon or late the day is coming, Tyrant reality shall be o'erthrown, And the universe shall be inhabited by bloggers alone. Reality shall vanish from our minds, And the material world from shall rust forever, Cruel objects no more shall exist. Virtual riches more than mind can picture, Online games, music, movies, and blogs Shall be ours upon that day. Bright will shine the blogosphere Purer shall its blogs be, On the day that sets us free. For that day we all must blog, Though we die before reality breaks; All must toil for blogdom's sake. Bloggers of the Blogosphere, Hearken well and spread the links to my blogs For golden future virtual time's sake "The singing of this song threw the bloggers into the wildest excitement."

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The End