Tom Stafford, author of Mind Hacks: Tips and Tools for Using your Brain and psychologist, thinks that he might be addicted to email.

He tells a disturbing story (extra disturbing because I see myself in it):

I must hit the ‘get mail’ button at least a hundred times a day. Sometimes, if I don’t have any new mail, I hit it again immediately, just to check. I interrupt my work to check my mail even when I know that I’m not going to find anything interesting and that I should just concentrate on what I am supposed to be doing. When I come back to my office it’s the first thing I do. If I’m prevented from checking my mail for more than a few hours I get a little jumpy and remain that way until I have.

He thinks that the answer is to be found in “operant conditioning”, one of the cardinal principles of behaviourist psychology:

This means the mechanisms by which behaviour is shaped by its consequences; how what we do depends on the rewards and punishments of what we did last time. This topic is the heart of behaviourism, that school of thought which dominated psychology for most of the last century.

One solution is to break the connection between action and reward. Like Glen Stansberry and Merlin Mann he recommends reducing the frequency of mail checks. Hard-core fans of the cold turkey school will check mail only twice a day. I would rather cut my heart out with a teaspoon, but it might work for you. Or close Mail.app altogether for six or eight hours. Urrggh.

Other possibilities, he suggests, are weakening the stimulus-action association (hide the Check Mail button), shifting the cost-benefit ratio (electric shocks administered by a mail check?) and rewarding alternative behaviour.

Whatever you might think about Behaviourism, it’s interesting reading, as is the link he provides to an article published eighteen months ago in the New York Times on designing computer interfaces that aid rather than diminish attention.email, internet, addiction, mail checks, behaviourism, addiction, productivity

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new type of spam that has been doing the rounds for the past few weeks.

This is not the “image spam” plague, but something else. Spammers are loading up inboxes with emails containing short extracts from authors like J.R.R. Tolkien, Alexander Dumas and Daniel Defoe.

Sometimes called “empty spam” because it contains no advertising pitch or offers or phishing attempts, this type is on the rise according to IronPort Systems . I can’t find an IronPort press release to confirm the figures, but the WSJ says that,

the number of empty spam messages has almost doubled to 4% of all spam email in recent weeks, according to IronPort Systems…. For a few days in June, it peaked at 40% of all spam.

Theories about the motivation behind “empty spam” messages vary. Some suggest that it is an attempt to confuse spam filters so that more malicious spam will slip through later.

Others point to a possible breakdown of communication between spam host servers and the virus-infected “zombie” computers that circulate the spam more widely. When communication breaks down, the zombies continue to send the “hashbusting” text that helps spam make it past the filters but without the “active package” which contains the advertising offer or phishing scam.

Unlike “image spam”, I haven’t seen any of this “empty spam” myself.spam, junk, email, empty spam, image spam, tolkien, dumas, defoe, internet

WebnoteHappy has been updated. This clever app with an unfortunate name is a bookmark manager that allows you to tag and annotate your links.

The new version (1.2) brings support for syncing your bookmarks with your del.icio.us account, adds hot key support for Firefox and Shiira, clickable hyperlinks in the notes field and more.

All the fields in a WebnoteHappy webnote are now editable, including the URL itself.

The app sells itself partly as a native Mac OS X interface for del.icio.us and it does look nice:

You can read the full list of changes in the release notes .

WebnoteHappy is shareware (USD 24.95) and is available from the developer’s web site.bookmarks, delicious, URLs, tagging, Web 2.0, firefox, internet, not apple mail

Spammers have discovered a new trick.

According to a report in USA Today, image-based spam is experiencing a huge growth spurt. Late last year it accounted for 1% of total spam messages; now it has suddenly risen to 21%.

In the newspaper article, journalist Jon Swartz describes the problem:

The newest spam uses technology that varies the content of individual messages — through colors, backgrounds, picture sizes or font types — so they appear to be distinct to spam filters… As a result, the messages are like snowflakes: No two are alike… The surge in new spam has largely eluded software filters and eaten up space on e-mail systems because each message is more than seven times larger than regular spam…

I’ve certainly noticed a recent surge in the amount of spam getting past Apple Mail’s excellent Junk Filter.

Much of it is image-based, although I am favoured more with various aids for my sexual potency than with the stock scams that are usually associated with image spam.

Mail’s Junk filter, based on Latent Semantic Analysis, only gets smarter as it goes along. I hope it is not a slow learner. Although, since the filter is text-based, this new form of spam may have outflanked it.

[Thanks, Bob]mail.app, apple mail, spam, junk filter, images, email, Internet, stock scams

Speaking of bloggers, plagiarism and content theft, earlier today high profile Mac blogger John Gruber posted news of a site that had completely ripped off Daring Fireball’s CSS and design.

The site looked like this:

Click image for a full-sized view

The only changes, John noted, were the removal of his name and copyright statement from the code.

By tonight the look of the site had changed . How the change happened I do not know, whether by natural contrition or some form of self-regulation among the blogging community.

In his apology the blogger said that “the site was meant to be a sandbox (test) site and was not supposed to [be] public-facing.”

He continues: “My apologies mostly to John – for not asking permission to tinker with his code and also to his readers – for any confusion.”

Daring Fireball is a very fine source of Mac news and opinion. Its Linked List elevates “human aggregation” to an art form. You can subscribe to the site , not only supporting John’s own writing but keeping alive the greater dream that quality can succeed in the online world.bloggers, content theft, plagiarism, intellectual property, Internet, daring fireball, apple, mac

Readers of Hawk Wings will know that I have an interest in philosophy and culture of the Internet, in the impact of email and the web on our conceptions of the world and ourselves, and all the other things that get posted here in the “email in general” category.

The Internet: A Philosophical Inquiry by Gordon Graham, Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, is a favourite.

So, I was excited to see a course in the newly-launched Berkeley at iTunes U on the “Foundations of American Cyberculture”.

Then I read the course description:

This new course will enable students to think critically about, and engage in practical experiments in, the complex interactions between new media and perceptions and performances of embodiment, agency, citizenship, collective action, individual identity, time and spatiality. We will pay particular attention to the categories of personhood that make up the UC Berkeley American Cultures rubric (race and ethnicity), as well as to gender, nation, and disability. The argument threading through the course will be the ways in which new media both reinforce pre-existing social hierarchies, and yet offer possibilities for the transcendence of those very categories. The new media — and we will leave the precise definition of the new media as something to be argued about over the course of the semester — can be yet another means for dividing and disenfranchising, and can be the conduit of violence and transnational dominance.

Berkeley. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

[Via TUAW ]iTunes U, cyberculture, Internet, conduit of violence and transnational dominance

A long post on Central Desktop explains why email is still the best tool for collaboration.

Among other things, the post points out that email is customisable and tweakable in ways that other modes of online communication are not, that it is universally available and accessible and that people understood what it is and how to use it.

You may remember a flurry of Internet opinion a few months ago forecasting the imminent death of email and/or the replacement of email with wikis and Instant Messaging.email, collaboration, IM, wiki, Web 2.0, internet, productivity