“SPAM” a 19th Century Problem

In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. Up until the Great Depression wealthy North American residents would be deluged with nebulous investment offers. This problem never fully emerged in Europe to the degree that it did in the Americas, because telegraphy was regulated by national post offices in the European region.

History of Internet “SPAM” (1978-Present)

Although spamming has existed on the Internet since as early as 1978, the first major spamming incidents didn’t take place until the early 1990s.

Spamming began becoming a major problem at the same time that the Internet began its exponential mainstream expansion in 1993 (also known as Eternal September). More recently, Tim Roarty, using the tag tjroar, spammed across so many internet forums with such a high rate of posting that he is credited with a slow down in overall internet speed. Most major forums have disabled the ability to register as tjroar on their forum due to this problem. It is suspected taht tjroar was a collection of irc trojans and they trolled the internet to sign up for forums – fortunately the creator is unable to modify them and they only try to sign up as the user name “tjroar”.

Origin of the term “SPAM”

The term spam is widely believed to have derived from the SPAM sketch of the BBC television comedy series “Monty Python’s Flying Circus”.

The sketch features a small restaurant in which every item on the menu includes SPAM canned meat, and a chorus of Vikings drowning out all conversation with a song consisting almost entirely of the word “SPAM.”

References

• History
  • Reaction to the DEC Spam of 1978 Overview and text of the first known internet email spam.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Brands in the field of marketing originated in the 19th century with the advent of packaged goods. Industrialization moved the production of many household items, such as soap, from local communities to centralized factories. When shipping their items, the factories would literally brand their logo or insignia on the barrels used, which is where the term comes from.

These factories, generating mass-produced goods, needed to sell their products to a wider market, to a customer base familiar only with local goods. It quickly became apparent that a generic package of soap had difficulty competing with familiar, local products. The packaged goods manufacturers needed to convince the market that the public could place just as much trust in the non-local product.

Around 1900, James Walter Thompson published a house ad explaining trademark advertising. This was an early commercial explanation of what we now know as branding.

Many brands of that era, such as Uncle Ben’s rice and Kellogg’s breakfast cereal furnish illustrations of the problem. The manufacturers wanted their products to appear and feel as familiar as the local farmers’ produce. From there, with the help of advertising, manufacturers quickly learned to associate other kinds of brand values, such as youthfulness, fun or luxury, with their products. This kickstarted the practice we now know as branding.

Modern branding practices are studied and analyzed at research institutes such as the Zyman Institute of Brand Science at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

The term spam is derived from the Monty Python SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where everything on the menu includes SPAM luncheon meat. As the server recites the SPAM-filled menu, presently a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all normal conversation with a song, repeating “SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM” and singing “lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM” over and over again, stopping all conversation, hence SPAMming the dialogue. The excessive amount of SPAM in the sketch comes from British rationing in World War II. SPAM was one of the few foods that was not restricted and widely available, so by the time of the sketch, the British were fed up with the luncheon meat. Another similarity is that everything on the menu comes with SPAM, therefore representing that you can’t order something without receiving something you don’t want, much like one can’t be active on the Internet and never have spam sent to your e-mail address(es).

Although the first known instance of unsolicited commercial e-mail occurred in 1978 (unsolicited electronic messaging had already taken place over other media, with the first recorded instance being via telegram on September 13, 1904), the term “spam” for this practice had not yet been applied. In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs, who would repeat “SPAM” a huge number of times to scroll other users’ text off the screen. In the early Chat rooms in services like PeopleLink and the early days of AOL, they actually flooded the screen with sizeable quotes from the Monty Python routine. This was generally used as a tactic by insiders of a particular group who wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. This act, previously termed flooding or trashing, came to be called spamming as well. [1] By analogy, the term was soon applied to any large amount of text broadcast by one user, or sometimes by many users.

It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the same message. The first evident usage of this sense was by Joel Furr in the aftermath of the ARMM incident of March 31, 1993, in which a piece of experimental software released dozens of recursive messages onto the news.admin.policy newsgroup. Soon, this use had also become established—to spam Usenet was to flood newsgroups with junk messages.

Commercial spamming started in force on March 5, 1994, when a pair of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the “Green Card spam”, after the subject line of the postings. The two went on to widely promote spamming of both Usenet and e-mail as a new means of advertisement—over the objections of Internet users they labeled “anti-commerce radicals.” Within a few years, the focus of spamming (and antispam efforts) moved chiefly to e-mail, where it remains today. [2]

There are three popular fake etymologies of the word “spam”. The first, promulgated by Canter & Siegel themselves, is that “spamming” is what happens when one dumps a can of SPAM luncheon meat into a fan blade. The second is the backronym “shit posing as mail.” The third is similar, using “stupid pointless annoying messages.”

Hormel Foods Corporation, the makers of SPAM® luncheon meat, do not object to the Internet use of the term “spamming.” However, they do ask that the capitalized word “SPAM” be reserved to refer to their product and trademark. [3] By and large, this request is obeyed in forums which discuss spam—to the extent that to write “SPAM” for “spam” brands the writer as a newbie. However, Hormel has begun to press the trademark issue—first, when a firm registered the trademark “SpamArrest” in 2003, Hormel sued to invalidate the mark, [4], and more recently two failed attempts to revoke the mark “spambuster”.[5], [6]

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Google was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and brought a new concept to evaluating web pages. This concept, called PageRank, has been from the start important to the Google algorithm [1]. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and uses the logic that each link to a page is a vote for that page’s value. The more incoming links a page had the more “worthy” it is. The value of each incoming link itself varies directly based on the PageRank of the page it comes from and inversely on the number of outgoing links on that page.

With help from PageRank, Google proved to be very good at serving relevant results. Google became the most popular and successful search engine. Because PageRank measured an off-site factor, Google felt it would be more difficult to manipulate than on-page factors.

But manipulated it was. Webmasters had already developed link manipulation tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine. These methods proved to be equally applicable to Google’s algorithm. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links on a massive scale. PageRank’s reliance on the link as a vote of confidence in a page’s value was undermined as many webmasters sought to garner links purely to influence Google into sending them more traffic, irrespective of whether the link was useful to human site visitors.

It was time for Google—and other search engines—to look at a wider range of off-site factors. There were other reasons to develop more intelligent algorithms. The Internet was reaching a vast population of non-technical users who were often unable to use advanced querying techniques to reach the information they were seeking and the sheer volume and complexity of the indexed data was vastly different from that of the early days. Search engines had to develop predictive, semantic, linguistic and heuristic algorithms.

A proxy for the PageRank metric is still displayed in the Google Toolbar, but PageRank is only one of more than 100 factors that Google considers in ranking pages.

Today, most search engines keep their methods and ranking algorithms secret. A search engine may use hundreds of factors in ranking the listings on its SERPs; the factors themselves and the weight each carries may change continually.

Much current SEO thinking on what works and what doesn’t is largely speculation and informed guesses. Some SEOs have carried out controlled experiments to gauge the effects of different approaches to search optimization.

The following, though, are some of the considerations search engines could be building into their algorithms, and the list of Google patents [2] may give some indication as to what is in the pipeline:

• Age of site
• Length of time domain has been registered
• Age of content
• Regularity with which new content is added
• Age of link and reputation of linking site
• Standard on-site factors
• Negative scoring for on-site factors (for example, a dampening for sites with extensive keyword meta tags indicative of having being SEO-ed)
• Uniqueness of content
• Related terms used in content (the terms the search engine associates as being related to the main content of the page)
• Google Pagerank (Only used in Google’s algorithm)
• External links, the anchor text in those external links and in the sites/pages containing those links
• Citations and research sources (indicating the content is of research quality)
• Stem-related terms in the search engine’s database (finance/financing)
• Incoming backlinks and anchor text of incoming backlinks
• Negative scoring for some incoming backlinks (perhaps those coming from low value pages, reciprocated backlinks, etc.)
• Rate of acquisition of backlinks: too many too fast could indicate “unnatural” link buying activity
• Text surrounding outward links and incoming backlinks. A link following the words “Sponsored Links” could be ignored
• Use of “rel=nofollow” to suggest that the search engine should ignore the link
• Depth of document in site
• Metrics collected from other sources, such as monitoring how frequently users hit the back button when SERPs send them to a particular page
• Metrics collected from sources like the Google Toolbar, Google AdWords/Adsense programs, etc.
• Metrics collected in data-sharing arrangements with third parties (like providers of statistical programs used to monitor site traffic)
• Rate of removal of incoming links to the site
• Use of sub-domains, use of keywords in sub-domains and volume of content on sub-domains… and negative scoring for such activity
• Semantic connections of hosted documents
• Rate of document addition or change
• IP of hosting service and the number/quality of other sites hosted on that IP
• Other affiliations of linking site with the linked site (do they share an IP? have a common postal address on the “contact us” page?)
• Technical matters like use of 301 to redirect moved pages, showing a 404 server header rather than a 200 server header for pages that don’t exist, proper use of robots.txt
• Hosting uptime
• Whether the site serves different content to different categories of users (cloaking)
• Broken outgoing links not rectified promptly
• Unsafe or illegal content
• Quality of HTML coding, presence of coding errors
• Actual click through rates observed by the search engines for listings displayed on their SERPs
• Hand ranking by humans of the most frequently accessed SERPs

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

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Amazon at the Affiliate Meet Market

Early days

In the early days of affiliate marketing, there was very little control over what affiliates were doing, which was abused by a large number of affiliates. Affiliates used false advertisements, trademark bidding on search engines, forced clicks to get tracking cookies set on users’ computers, and Adware. Many affiliate programs were poorly managed.

This changed dramatically over the last few years for multiple reasons. Revenue generated online grew quickly. The e-commerce website, viewed as a marketing toy in the early days of the web, became an integrated part of the overall business plan and in some cases grew to a bigger business than the existing offline business. Many companies hired outside affiliate management companies to manage the affiliate program.

When Google, the most popular search engine on the Internet, introduced AdWords (pay-per-click advertising pioneered by Goto.com, then Overture.com and now Yahoo! Search Marketing) many Merchants became aware of the issue of trademark bidding by affiliates. The terms of service were quickly modified by most merchants and structures were put in place to monitor affiliate activities.

Adware

Adware is still an issue today, but affiliate marketers have taken steps to fight it. Merchants usually had no clue what adware was, what it does and how it was damaging their brand. Affiliate marketers became aware of the issue much quicker, especially because they noticed that adware often overwrites their tracking cookie and results in a decline of commissions. Affiliates who do not use adware became enraged by adware, which they felt was stealing hard earned commission from them. Adware usually has no valuable purpose or provides any useful content to the often unaware user that has the adware running on his computer. Affiliates discussed the issues in various affiliate forums such as ABestWeb and started to get organized. It became obvious that the best way to cut off adware was by discouraging merchants from advertising via adware. Merchants that did not care or even supported adware were made public by affiliates, which damaged the merchants’ reputations and also hurt the merchants’ general affiliate marketing efforts. Many affiliates simply “canned” the merchant or switched to a competitor’s affiliate program. Eventually, affiliate networks were also forced by merchants and affiliates to take a stand and ban adware publishers from their network.

The new Web

The rise of blogging, interactive online communities and other new technologies, web sites and services based on the concepts that are now called Web 2.0 have impacted the affiliate marketing world as well. The new media allowed merchants to get closer to their affiliates and improved communication between each other. New portals like Return on Affiliates allow affiliates, merchants, and networks to interconnect easily, on a professional and a personal level.

New developments have made it harder for unscrupulous affiliates to make money. Emerging black sheep are detected and made known to the affiliate marketing community with much greater speed and efficiency.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: Network Marketing and the Economy! Can Distributors Survive?

The first recorded use of the term spyware occurred on October 17, 1994 in a Usenet post that poked fun at Microsoft’s business model. Spyware later came to refer to espionage equipment such as tiny cameras. However, in early 2000 the founder of Zone Labs, Gregor Freund, used the term in a press release for the ZoneAlarm Personal Firewall. ^[1] Since then, computer-users have used the term in its current sense.

In early 2000, Steve Gibson of Gibson Research realized that advertising software had been installed on his system, and he suspected that the software was stealing his personal information. After analyzing the software he determined that they were adware components from the companies Aureate (later Radiate) and Conducent. He eventually rescinded his claim that the ad software collected information without the user’s knowledge, but still chastised the ad companies for covertly installing the spyware and making it difficult to remove.

As a result of his analysis in 2000, Gibson released the first anti-spyware program, OptOut, and many more software-based antidotes have appeared since then. ^[1] International Charter now offers software developers a Spyware-Free Certification program. ^[2]

According to a November 2004 study by AOL and the National Cyber-Security Alliance, 80% of surveyed users’ computers had some form of spyware, with an average of 93 spyware components per computer. 89% of surveyed users with spyware reported that they did not know of its presence, and 95% reported that they had not given permission for the installation of the spyware. ^[3]

References

1. ↑ ^{a b} Wienbar, Sharon. “The Spyware Inferno“. News.com. August 13, 2004.
2. ↑ “Spyware Certification“. International Charter. Retrieved July 10, 2005.
3. ↑ “AOL/NCSA Online Safety Study“. America Online & The National Cyber Security Alliance. October 2004.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

SEO began in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a site to the various engines which would run spiders, programs to “crawl” the site, and store the collected data. The search engines then sorted the information by topic, and served results based on pages they had spidered. As the number of documents online kept growing, and more webmasters realized the value of organic search listings, so popular search engines began to sort their listings so they could display the most relevant pages first. This was the start of a search engine versus webmaster game that continues to this day.

At first search engines were guided by the webmasters themselves. Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as category and keyword meta tags. Meta tags provided a guide to each page’s content. When some webmasters began to abuse meta tags, causing their pages to rank for irrelevant searches, search engines abandoned their consideration of Meta tags and instead developed more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account factors that were more diverse, including:

• Text within the title tag
• Domain name
• URL directories and file names
• HTML tags: headings, bold and emphasized text
• Keyword density
• Keyword proximity
• Alt attributes for images
• Text within NOFRAMES tags

By relying so extensively on factors that were still within the webmasters’ exclusive control, search engines continued to suffer from abuse and ranking manipulation. In order to provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their SERPs showed the most relevant search results, rather than useless pages stuffed with keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. This led to the rise of a new kind of search engine.

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Edo period advertising flyer from 1806 for a traditional medicine called Kinseitan

In ancient times the most common form of advertising was “word of mouth”. However, commercial messages and election campaign displays were found in the ruins of Pompeii. Egyptians used papyrus to create sales messages and wall posters. Lost-and-found advertising on papyrus was common in Greece and Rome. Wall or rock painting for commercial advertising is another manifestation of an ancient media advertising form which is present to this day in many parts of Asia, Africa, and South America. For instance, tradition of wall paintings may be traced back to India rock-art paintings that goes back to 4000 BC, see Bhatia 2000: 62-68 on the evolution of wall advertising. As printing developed in the 15th and 16th century, advertising expanded to include handbills. In the 17th century advertisements started to appear in weekly newspapers in England.

These early print ads were used mainly to promote books (which were increasingly affordable) and medicines (which were increasingly sought after as disease ravaged Europe). Quack ads became a problem, which ushered in regulation of advertising content.

As the economy was expanding during the 19th century, the need for advertising grew at the same pace. In America, the classified ads became popular, filling pages of newspapers with small print messages promoting all kinds of goods. The success of this advertising format led to the growth of mail-order advertising. In 1843 the first advertising agency was established by Volney Palmer in Philadelphia. At first the agencies were just brokers for ad space in newspapers, but by the 20th century, advertising agencies started to take over responsibility for the content as well.

The 1960s saw advertising transform into a modern, more scientific approach in which creativity was allowed to shine, producing unexpected messages that made advertisements interesting to read. The Volkswagen ad campaign featuring such headlines as “Think Small” and “Lemon” ushered in the era of modern advertising by promoting a “position” or “unique selling proposition” designed to associate each brand with a specific idea in the reader or viewer’s mind.

Today, advertising is evolving even further, with “guerrilla” promotions that involve unusual approaches such as staged encounters in public places, giveaways of products such as cars that are covered with brand messages, and interactive advertising where the viewer can respond to become part of the advertising message.

A print advertisement for the 1913 issue of the Encyclopædia Britannica

This guide is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.

Video: An advertising history…