Via the BBC: Google's Spam Tsar 

The whole workspace is divided into areas covering various aspects of Gmail from the calendar to documents and from the reader to spam.

The 'Spam Tsar' who keeps Gmail free from offers you don't want.

The guys fighting to keep spam out of the Gmail inbox are tucked away in a dark corner of the office. Brad Taylor is known as the 'Spam Tsar', a title he quite enjoys.

He has been working on Gmail since its public launch back in 2004 and says he has seen a real growth in the amount of unsolicited email flooding into the system.

"Originally when we launched 25% of email was spam. We caught a lot of that. Over time its grown and grown and currently around 75% of all email is spam and so our job has got a lot harder."

What's he fighting?

We can spend up to half our working day going through our inbox, leaving us tired, frustrated and unproductive.

A recent study found one-third of office workers suffer from e-mail stress.

And it is expensive, too. One FTSE firm estimated that dealing with pointless e-mails cost it £39m a year.

Now firms are being forced to help staff deal with the daily avalanche in their inboxes. Some hire e-mail consultants, while others are experimenting with e-mail free days.

Tsar or Czar? 

1. also tsar or tzar (zär, tsär) A male monarch or emperor, especially one of the emperors who ruled Russia until the revolution of 1917.
2. A person having great power; an autocrat: "the square-jawed, ruddy complacency of Jack Farrell, the czar of the Fifteenth Street police station" (Ernest Hemingway).
3. Informal An appointed official having special powers to regulate or supervise an activity: a racetrack czar; an energy czar.

Usage Note: The word czar can also be spelled tsar. Czar is the most common form in American usage and the one nearly always employed in the extended senses "any tyrant" or informally, "one in authority." But tsar is preferred by most scholars of Slavic studies as a more accurate transliteration of the Russian and is often found in scholarly writing with reference to one of the Russian emperors.

This is Serenity. She has Lukemia.

Serenity, was diagnosed two days ago with Acute Lymphocytic Leukemia . She's two.

Her Dad, Phil, is a friend of mine. He's been blogging about her condition and situation for the last few days.

The Burns family is in for some very rough times. They're not rich. While the medical bills have yet to start rolling in, the family could use some financial support to help with the expenses and costs of a large family and lost income.

This widget will allow you to help Serenity and the Burns Family with some of these costs while they go through this. If you can, please make a small donation below through this Chipin Widget and lets see if we can't take at least a little of the financial burdon off of a family in tremendous turmoil. 

This is from Phil's blog:

"Several people have contacted us asking if there is a ’support Serenity’ site or account being created.  There is.  Some other people are heading it up and I’m told it should be ready by Tuesday.  I don’t know a lot of the details on it, but for those asking, we’ll have that soon.  I’m especially moved by the offers of donations.  It was something that never occurred to me would happen, but several people have pointed out that this is going to cost a ton of money - another thing I’m not even thinking about.  It’s interesting how you can stress about money and then when something like this happens that is probably going to cost more than our house - money isn’t what you stress or think about - you just do it.  So to those thinking about it for us - thank you!  I’m sure that once we get home and back to the real world that will become a much higher priority for us. 

We have to be here in the hospital for 7 days starting today.  They have to closely monitor her while they get her started on treatment and refine the protocol they are going to use.  After that it will be weekly, then monthly visits for more than two years.  We’re honestly looking forward to all those treatments - it means we’ll have our little girl with us that long and hopefully get cured and she can go on to live a full life."

This is a drawing that Edger did of our buddy Steve and his girlfriend. (Steve's an artist too.)

As an artist you often hear this: "I don't know art but I know what I like."

That's bullshit actually. If you knew about art, the art you like would drastically change. Saying that you don't know art but you know what you like is a complete manifestation and admittance that wallowing in ignorance is preferable to interest and knowledge. Here's what a critic said of Edgars work.

A recent show at the Tatistscheff Gallery in New York City (May 13–June 26) showed six works by Edgar Jerins that stretched the definition of drawing. There was nothing offhand or intimate about these huge charcoals on sheets of paper often measuring five-by-eight feet. The Nebraska-born artist describes these unsettling interior genre scenes as narrative portraits. The figures—friends and relatives, worked up from hundreds of photographs—are depicted in emotionally fraught domestic situations. Jerins admits to a special interest in the discontents of the middle-aged American male, as one title, The Artist’s Family, “We have to Move” (2004), suggests. Alienation is a venerable American theme, most notably embodied by Edward Hopper, but Jerins’s pictures are far more

I logged into my account this morning and saw that I've personally invited 100 people into Sendside.

By the way, we've left our Beta and released v1.0 for our Personal and soon to be released Business and Enterprise Editions. If you'd like an account, fire me off a request through the link below and I'll set you up. 

GET YOUR OWN SENDSIDE ACCOUNT >

 
Of interest may be that <jeffbarson> following my name. It's my Sendside 'Member Name' and with this new release you can now send directly to that and I'll receive that message. In future releases you'll be able to send to other unique identifiers just by typing them into the TO field. If they're unique, they'll be delivered directly to that recipient's Sendside inbox.

The takeaway here for all of you 'social network types' is that Sendside doesn't rely on your email address but identifies you in the same way that you're identified by all of your unique identifiers offline.. as an individual with a unique identity. Cell phone, email address, social security number, street address, military ID, name... anything unique, or any unique combination of identifiers could be used to send a message.

There are plenty of identifiers you can send to, but they're generally some sort of username inside the network. As far as I know, Sendside's the only network that has the potential to combine ANY online identifier as well as all things offline to determine exactly who you are and deliver content to you with total precision and security.

That, buy the way, is tres impressive. 

So I've joined Twitter.

While I can see some merit, I'm not yet convinced that it's a killer app and not just a fad. It feels something like a feature looking for an application. Perhaps I'm wrong. I often am. Certainly it looks to be taking off.

Here's Allan Young's take on Twitter: The Twitter Influence Ratio 

With the Twitter Influence Ratio, we’re going to try and get a read on someone’s true influence level. It stands to reason that if you are interesting, have neat thoughts, and add value to the network, people will naturally gravitate to you and “follow you.” Some of the most influential members of Twitter have many more followers than people they follow. So the Twitter Influence Ratio will attempt to express this relationship as;

Followers / Following = Twitter Influence Ratio

Example: 533 / 609 = 0.875

In the above example, one such self-branded “social app guru” has 533 followers and is following 609 others. This gives him a Twitter Influence Ratio of only 0.875 which means this person is not very influential. Intuitively, you ought to have more followers interested in what you have to say than the number of people you’re following. One might say that 533 followers is nothing to sneeze at. I agree, but the fact that this person has so many followers and is following so many more makes it highly probable that he is what is known as a “friend whore” or “follow whore.” Like the desperate high schooler, he’s just trading votes. Someone with a TI Ratio of less than 1 but is only following 30 others is probably not out there actively trading votes or follows. If I were looking for a consultant, I would run away from this guy and find someone more influential.

It's easy to see what Allan's talking about. My own Twitter Influence Ratio is abysmal, roughly two-to-one or .5. I guess I'll have to become more profuse in my twitting about... we'll, there's your problem.

Source: The Twitter Influence Ratio (http://allantyoung.com/2008/04/24/the-twitter-influence-ratio/)

I love this kind of smart-ass information delivery. After I get the 'corporate' look and feel stuff done for Sendside I'll be looking to stimulate the rest of the economy with just this type of tongue-in-cheek delivery. 

Here's CommonCraft's channel on Blip.tv.

There are any number of ways of explaining complex systems. Duarte Design is another company based out in Silicon Valley who has built a business on information design. They produced Al Gore's presentation 'An Inconvenient Truth' and if you've seen that, you know that it's probably the most interesting two-hour Powerpoint presentation you've ever seen. (Although they did it in Apple's Keynote.)

CommonCraft wows you with clarity rather than production values. They're not the first to use this paper cut-out technique or draw diagrams on a whiteboard, but they're great at distilling out the information that's relevant and putting that into a two or three minute spot that doesn't bore you to tears while you're watching it.

One of the immediate benefits of this group is that it's started out with a larger group, somewhere around 25 right now, allowing them to have some ability to fund more deals and spread the love around a little. 

Last week's meeting was more than four hours long, with two pitches and dinner. I can see that the Park City Angel Network will be around for quite some time and the the members are serious about creating a sustainable group. I mentioned that I thought it would be beneficial to roll our smaller group into this larger one. There's a considerable amount of bandwidth needed to manage these groups and 7 is just too small.

There's a growing community of quality startups out there. Park City is set to be the place to bring the best of them if you're a Utah startup. 

The constant rethinking and retooling of how we handle our members experience with the product put me in mind of something that Seth Godin posted about Google and their push to make the user experience better. 

From Seth Godin:

Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google,

"We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd made a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better."

...As a result of Google's decision, they made counter-intuitive decisions. No ads, for example. No clutter. No popups, no tricky interpretations of privacy policies. Instead, every decision was, "If this is going to be the one and only choice, the best search engine in the world, what should we do?" The feeling was, if they built that, the money would take care of itself. And the investors who bought in were in on the game from the start.

Sendside has no ads in the personal edition. (Sendside's business editions will be software as a service and generate the revenue.)

We're very aware that the experience users have with our free personal edition will impact our growth. We're going to be pushing very hard to make it perform.

One point of interest that strikes me is that even with the relatively small number of users we currently have, that some of them have already asked it it's possible to port all of their email addresses into their Sendside account. Of course that could well negate the ability we have to prevent all spam and phishing and destroy the very value that's inherent in the system.

Of course the real option is just to accrue more members.  

I know Allan. I like Allan. He's smart and a very critical thinker. 

I've recently been editing me RSS feeds down to what I consider something of a manageable level. (I had over 300 and it was not manageable.) Allan's blog is one of only two I've added to my feed reader in the last four months.