How much do your eyeballs cost?

Spammers get them for free, but a company in San Francisco is betting that you'll be willing to set up a new e-mail address and accept commercial messages if you get paid for looking at them while being shielded from pump-and-dump stock scam spams and other standard spam. OK. They have my attention.

Boxbe says that some big companies will pay you 15 cents just to open an e-mail. If you create an e-mail account at boxbe.com, marketers can use the address to send you commercial messages but they have to pay what you specify to talk with you. Boxbe will take a quarter of what the company that wants to contact you pays. It's also a challenge/response anti-spam system, so friends and family can fill out a form that only a human could read to use the address.

This is a concept that could close the door on spammers while allowing legitimate companies that want to offer you legitimate products and services that you might actually be interested in. Boxbe says big companies already spend $500 per person on direct marketing. The new service gives consumers a chance to cash in and it cuts out the traditional marketing programs.

Company co-founder Thede Loder's graduate research at the University of Michigan examined spam, which is currently about 80% of the e-mail transported by the Internet. If companies have to pay to reach you with an e-mail, the spammer's business model (send 1,000,000 messages for free and get a 0.000001% response) falls apart.

You can allow Boxbe to determine the best price for your eyeballs or you can specify a minimum price. I set a minimum price of 25 cents. Instead of having Boxbe send you the money, you can choose to have the company make a donation in your name to one of several charitable organizations. I selected Second Harvest.

I don't mind legitimate commercial messages from organizations I'm likely to do business with, but I strongly resent spam. Boxbe launched late in 2006. I wish them luck. For more information, see the Boxbe website.

An update on Corel Graphics Suite X3

In the old days, Corel was more interested in stuffing each new release with features, some of which failed to operate as advertised. Today's Corel is more interested in performance, reliability, and stability–a point that I mentioned when I spoke with Gerard Metrailler, Director for the Corel Draw Graphics Suite.

The full interview will be part of the podcast, which is available beginning February 4, 2007. (The podcast will be at the top of this page, but is also available without cost from Apple's Itunes Music Store.)

You can download the latest version here and try it to see what you think. If you decide to buy and you don't qualify for the $180 upgrade price, the full version costs $380. There is no Mac version of the application and the Corel Graphics Suite X3's operating specifications include Windows 2000, Windows XP Tablet PC, Windows XP, or Windows Vista with at least 256 MB of RAM (I would recommend a minimum of 1GB), and 200 MB of hard disk space. The suite will run on a Pentium III 600MHz processor, but you won't like the response time. A more realistic minimum would be a Pentium 4 1.5GHz system. Screen resolution must be at least 1024x768 (more is better).

I reviewed the Corel Graphics Suite X3 last year and gave the application 4 cats. You can read the review here.

Nerdly News

The end of Googlebombing

Michael Quinion, who writes about international English from a British viewpoint, asks this week if Googlebombing is dead.

"Notoriously, at one time if you entered the search phrase 'miserable failure' as the search term in Google, the page that appeared top of the list of results was President Bush's biography from the official White House site. As Google ranks pages by their popularity, based on the number of external links to them, pranksters were able to manipulate the order of its results through setting up lots of links from other sites that were keyed to the phrase. This is Googlebombing. The trick doesn't work any more - Google have got tired of the game and have taken their ball home. Top of the list will probably be a BBC News report from 2003 about the Googlebombing of Bush. It has begun to filter such prankster results, supposedly to protect its reputation, fearing that people might think such frivolous results were its opinion. The earliest example I can find for the term Googlebombing is from the newsgroup alt.religion.kibology (don't ask) dated March 2002. As a result of Google's action, the word 'Googlebombing' seems likely to vanish from the online vocabulary fairly soon."

That's from this week's World Wide Words. Subscriptions are free from http://www.worldwidewords.org/.

Google Server Error

If a Google server crashes and nobody writes about it, did it really happen?

Those who use Google's e-mail product occasionally see messages about the service not being available. Usually it returns within a few minutes. Google also serves news and late one night recently, the service began reporting "Google Error. Server Error. The server encountered a temporary error and could not complete your request. Please try again in 30 seconds."

The company, which tends to be even less forthcoming than Microsoft, has not explained what happened, why it happened, or what Google will do to prevent it from happening again. Google's PR prefers to deal with the media by e-mail, which makes follow-up questions virtually impossible to ask–at least if a deadline is involved.

The cause is likely nothing more than a server overload caused by an unanticipated spike in usage, but it could have been a software bug, a storage problem, or even human error.

Also this week, Google announced that its 4th quarter profits tripled from last year and Wall Street reacted by dropping the value of Google stock by about 2 percent.

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