Haven’t been blogging, but I have been working. Finishing up the paper for AoIR, and putting up an MT-driven web site for my grant research.
I leave for Toronto Wednesday night, and once I get through the Thursday morningn presentation I’ll get to relax and enjoy both the conference and the city.
There are two restaurants I ate at when I was in Toronto in July that I’m hoping to visit again while I’m there. One is the Epicure Cafe on Queen Street W, where I had an excellent and surprisingly inexpensive dinner the night I arrived for ALA. The other was a wonderful Mauritian restaurant called Blue Bay Cafe at the corner of Dundas and Roncesvalles. (I’m blogging this because I’d forgotten the names of both, and needed to have a friend remind me. Now I’ll have the names and links easily available as needed.)
One of the ideas that seems to have reached some level of “escape velocity” out of O’Reillys “FooCamp” this weekend is the email transaction cost approach to stopping spam.
Don Park (who proposed his own “Trsted Email Network” solution a few days ago) points to Tim Bray’s description of the idea.
I’ve heard this tiny-cost-per-message proposal before, and while I appreciate its advantages, it raises some concerns for me.
There would need to be a way, at the minimum, to provide no-charge email within an organization (so I wouldn’t be charged for mail sent from my RIT account to students with RIT accounts notifying them of exam grades, for example).
I’m also worried about the “digital divide” impact—what does this do to people who don’t have credit cards, for example? Do they stop being able to send and recieve email? Will there be email vending machines, or prepaid email cards?
The idea works really well for the technological elite, those of us for whom a few extra dollars a month for email would be a trivial expense, and for whom adding a level of complexity would have minimal impact. I’m not sure if it holds up when you get outside of the inner circle of privilege and skill. Will my grandmother pay an additional cost for email? Probably not. She’ll stop using it. Will most parents give their kids extra allowance for sending email? Only if they’re pretty technologically sophisticated, I suspect.
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