Loading ...(With a lot of credit to George Lenzer, blogger at alt.think!)
Here’s some facts about email’s biggest annoyance. Did you know:
- Spam is largely automated? There aren’t sweatshops full of people typing up those messages at lightning speed in some less developed nation for half a cent per day. In fact, the automation of spam is one aspect of it that makes it so difficult to combat.
- Your own PC might be a spam bot? Just as with medical conditions, I’ll leave the diagnosis of your PC being a spam bot to your chosen expert analyst, however… It’s quite easy to have your PC sending out tons of spam without you knowing it. Especially now that the typical desktop PC has 1980s super computer power ten times over and a fairly fast internet connection. You may not even notice a slowdown at all. Make sure you keep those OS updates and anti-virus/anti-malware signatures up to date. Also make sure you keep all of your networked software up to date too. That includes broswers, browser plug-ins, things like Java and Flash, IM clients, mail clients, etc…
- Spam can’t be traced back to it’s original source no matter what some movies and TV shows illustrate? In technical terms there is something of a list of routes that tells you where spam came from included in the message. This is known as a mail header and generally says, “The message arrived at your address from the address listed below. The message arrived to that address from the address listed below that. The message arrived to that address from the address listed below that”… But even if you go back to the first address in the list, it is likely that even that address was just someone’s home PC being controlled remotely by a spammer. So it’s a dead end. There is no way for an end user, or even a network administrator to track the message back to the accountable party and then file charges at them.
- Personal home computers infected with worms and viruses can generate spam on their own without a spammer controlling the system? Not necessarily spam that is useful to anyone, but the cryptic sort where you see excerpts of various mail messages spliced together. These systems also splice together the prefix and the domain of an e-mail address (the parts before and after the @ sign, respectively) in order to come up with new addresses to send to. Sometimes those messages actually hit a real person. And worst of all, these infected machines will use all of the e-mail addresses they have access to as the FROM address. This means that for all of the non-existent addresses that are created by this random patter, the unfortunate person being spoofed in the FROM field will get “scatterback” non-delivery messages. This usually makes people worry that they’ve been infected when they haven’t.
- Spammers, through the resource of these compromised “bot nets” have the ability to overload entire networks for purposes other than spam? The bot nets are used for more than just sending spam. In the past few years incidences of extortion on high profile sites have occurred. One party threatens another party who absolutely must remain online to be profitable with an attack that will knock them off the internet. That is unless they pay the requested sum of money.
Spam is a huge problem, and one that will not be easily solved. Mail administrators, like George, are constantly trying new tweaks or methodologies to lessen the amount of spam in your inbox…but the chances of them being completely successful are very low. It’s too easy for spammers to deluge mail systems with garbage, too fast. The next time you get a spam message in your email, be thankful you’re not seeing the other 95% of them that your mail admin helped to prevent. Over 100 billion spam messages are sent per day.
What does this mean to me, Laura?
- Be thankful for all of the spam you’re NOT getting.
- Keep your virus, anti-spyware and operating system up to date so that your PC does not become an infected zombie machine.
- Spam isn’t going away any time soon. It will only get worse.
- Bring your mail admin some cookies. Really.
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Ah, Twitter is a wonderful thing. I asked members of the Twitterverse to catalog the problems of library web sites, and my followers (as friends on Twitter are called) did not disappoint. I got responses not only from both library and non-library folks, but even a bit of international participation with a comment or two from Australia.
Here’s a sample of much of what I received:
- “Nonsensical links to products by name. Bookletters, EBSCO, iBistro.”
- “Branch hours/locations not easy to find from the library home page.”
- Having to…”scroll waaay down to bottom to find search box and then was Title(not keyword).”
- “Animated gifs and blinking text.”
- “Focus on library materials and facilities, rather than how people use our materials and facilities.”
- “Acronyms.”
- “No site search. C’mon, time to leave 1998.”
- “Hiding your staff and/or hiding ways (or not providing them at all) to contact staff through the web site.”
- “Library jargon: what the heck is a ‘electronic reference database’ to the layperson?”
I saw at least one major theme here: many libraries don’t have sites that are intended for the end user. Too many library sites are designed around the perceived needs of library staff, rather than for their patrons. I encourage every library to take a good, hard look at their public-facing web site(s) and ask the question “Who is this really for?”
Here’s some additional sins I’ll add to the list:
- Can’t find the address and/or phone number for at least the main branch on the front page.
- Too much text on the front page. Don’t put the whole 3-paragraph story there; just a teaser. People scan the web; they don’t read. When I see too much text, I’m outta there.
What other problems with library web sites do you commonly see? Share’em in the comments!
Don Yarman is the Deputy Director of Delaware County Public Library.
Probably by now, you’re using a web browser that has a search box in the upper right-hand corner. Do you use it? You should; it’s handy and it’s awesome.
I used to hate it. I already had the Google toolbar and Google is my default start page. Why on earth do I need three ways to search Google when I open my browser? I’ve got Amazon, eBay, Yahoo, IMDB, and Wikipedia bookmarked already – I can just go to those sites if I want to search them.
Then I discovered the Firefox extension “Add to Search Bar.” After you load that into your copy of Firefox, all you need to do is right-click on a website’s search box, and that search becomes readily accessible from that box. It has changed my life.*
My favorite use for it is library catalogs. Since the search terms stay present in the box, I can first search my own library catalog, then the library nearest my house, then the biggest library in my region. Beyond that, I can search our first-source ILL lender, WorldCat, and Amazon. All this without retyping my search terms: I just pick a different target and press Enter.
Add to Search Bar doesn’t work with all search targets. The new Ohio Web Library search isn’t compatible, but you can still add OWL to your search bar by clicking the link on the resources page.
“So what does this mean to me, Don?”
- Browsers have a search box right there in the user’s face. Sure, lots of people never move it off Google. But if they do, you want your library to be there.
- Power users can figure out how to add our catalogs on their own, but we should make it easy for them and create prominent “Install the Library Catalog Search Plugin” links.**
- Toolbars are handy, and great marketing, but they take up valuable screen real estate that could be used for displaying content. If your library has developed a toolbar, good for you; but make sure that your catalog can alternatively be added to the existing browser search box instead of making users add a special box just for you.
Last word: a theme that Mean Laura keeps bringing up here is that the web is no longer about “pages” – it’s about services and content that may or may not be tied to particular pages and sites. This is a fairly easy way for us to put our services where our users can more easily take advantage of them.
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* You can also add search engines to IE; instructions can be found under the “Find More Providers…” option. More difficult than the Firefox right-click, but you might not be a Firefox fan. You would be wrong, but it’s a free country.
** I know what you’re saying, “Physician, heal thyself. Your library doesn’t have one of those links.” Shut up. We’re working on it.
For the past several months, I have been experimenting with a little-known web application called Weblin. In effect, it allows you to have a little avatar (Weblin) that appears on any web site you visit. This avatar can then see and communicate with other Weblins it encounters on that site. In essence, Weblin turns your web browser into an online social medium all its own.
As you might suspect, more Weblins congregate around the more popular sites. Visit, for example, Google or YouTube or Twitter with your Weblin and you will invariably see a fair number or even a crowd of others visiting those sites. While you’re there, you can cause your Weblin to perform various actions, including dancing, waving, laughing, yawning, clapping and more. Your Weblin can also, of course, chat or private message with other Weblins. You can also “wousle” them, which is a way for a Weblin to introduce themself. You also have the option to make another Weblin a contact, so that you can see when they are online. There are also other interactive features, such as being able to maintain an inventory of items which you can trade with other Weblins.
Weblins on YouTube
What I LIKED about Weblin
- The potential is interesting. It gives a new visual dimension to text chat by using avatars. I could maybe see a library using something like this for casual questions from patrons.
- You can right-click on any Weblin to see their profile. This may help you identify who could be interesting to talk to. However, the Weblin web site records who looks at a profile, so this cannot be done anonymously.
- A lot of the Weblin community is not from the U.S. Many Weblins show a little flag next to them to indicate country of origin. As far as nationality goes, it’s a fairly diverse user base.
- The ability to take a web page and mail it directly to yourself is perhaps the only major practical add-on of this application.
WHAT I DISLIKED about Weblin
- Perhaps it would have been different if I had a male avatar, but the vast majority of communications I received revolved around whether or not I was a potential dating prospect.
- Personally, I found the Weblin site to be confusing at times. For example, the link to “Shop” does not allow one to shop for new inventory items, but instead is a way for a Weblin to create a shop of their own.
- The sound effects will likely drive one crazy. Every time someone chats, a sharp tweet can be heard and it’s grating. The static-like noise when Weblins appear is also annoying. It often got to the point where I just turned Weblin off entirely.
- In the 2-3 months I’ve been using Weblin, I never found anyone I really wanted to maintain contact with (back to my first point in this list, which points out that most Weblins were just hitting on me). I did run into someone I knew from the Netherlands once (and I didn’t know he had a Weblin).
- <PERSONAL NOTE>Frankly, I was just a little creeped out…and I’m not exactly the shyest person on the planet. Knowing that all these other people were seeing the same thing I was seeing in some fashion was a little unnerving. </PERSONAL NOTE>
Overall, I was just not that impressed with this as a service. I am forced to relegate it to the realm of “Has Potential, Is Kind of Cute, That’s It.” Patrons of Ohio’s libraries are most likely not aware of Weblin and there is no real compelling reason to have one, other than to experiment.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO ME, LAURA?
- This is not (at least, not yet) a service that really is useful for public libraries.
- Having a female avatar is less likely to be productive than having a male one, IMHO.
- The “Send webpage as email” function is unique enough that I’m leaving Weblin installed for use, as needed.
- This application has a long way to go to make it more usable for the general public.