Bryan C. Fleming

This is still a ‘work-in-progress’ but here it goes:

Bryan Fleming’s First Law of Spam: The amount of Spam an Internet System receives is in proportion to its popularity. It is also inversely proportional to the cost of sending a message through that system.

So let’s start testing this:

A big system that’s free will get a lot of Spam. Think about these:

- Email (Check)
- Search Engines (Check)
- Blogs (Check) – ever heard of comment Spam? How about Splogs (Spam-Blogs)?
- Instant Messaging (Check)
- Chat Rooms (Check)
- Hmm… I wonder how My-Space is doing??

Now let’s think of some big systems that cost money:

- Yahoo paid directory ($300 a year). No Spam there…
- Google Ad-sense. We’ll there’s certainly less Spam as the cost per keyword increases.

Of course the only reason little systems don’t get Spam is because they’re not popular yet.

I’m going to keep working on this one, but I think I’m on to something here. If anyone thinks I’m wrong. Tell me!

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