Who could resist reading on when an article starts like this?

Would you like your penis enlarged? It is a question I get asked a lot.

Really?

Not by women, thankfully, but in the e-mails I receive every morning. For just $70, I could open up "new exciting horizons of sensual pleasure" and put an end to "being shy of [my] manhood in the showers".

It’s a great piece about a BBC investigation into spam. The eventual conclusion should be obvious but sadly isn’t widely-known enough: that when you click on a spam email you are not only opening yourself up to being scammed, but you’re also encouraging more spam to be inflicted on the rest of us. Don’t do it, bozo. (A sad case of a negative externality.)
Relatedly, Steven Landsburg calls for those who create computer viruses to be executed.

He reports:

I’ve just got back from ten days abroad (from Amsterdam to Israel to several cities in China) and while I was in China AT&T cut off my phone service. Why? Because I’d apparently run up a $2,100 bill.
And how did that happen, when I hardly used the phone at all? Because the iPhone’s email app keeps automatically fetching email every ten minutes even when it’s roaming abroad. I know I am the last person on the planet to discover this…

I doubt it, Chris: you’re the editor-in-chief of Wired, for crying out loud! Read the whole story here.

Cory Doctorow thinks so, in a piece subtly titled "How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook":

Sure, networks generally follow Metcalfe’s Law: "the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system." This law is best understood through the analogy of the fax machine: a world with one fax machine has no use for faxes, but every time you add a fax, you square the number of possible send/receive combinations (Alice can fax Bob or Carol or Don; Bob can fax Alice, Carol and Don; Carol can fax Alice, Bob and Don, etc).
But Metcalfe’s law presumes that creating more communications pathways increases the value of the system, and that’s not always true (see Brook’s Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later").
Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I’m inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel: "Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance." Perhaps we can call this "boyd’s Law" for danah boyd, the social scientist who has studied many of these networks from the inside as a keen-eyed net-anthropologist and who has described the many ways in which social software does violence to sociability in a series of sharp papers.

Cory has many more complaints  - and a separate one about privacy here.
Meanwhile Seamus McCauley thinks Facebook advertising is dead on arrival because people will get plug-ins to block Facebook ads the same way we all use Firefox to block the advertising on the rest of the web.

At the heart of Cory’s complaint is the idea that Facebook tries to trap us into eyeballing the site by, for example, sending highly uninformative messages - "Bob has send you a message on Facebook, click here to read it". He believes that we’ll all give up soon enough because it’s all too annoying.
I tend to agree. My research on rational addiction suggests that even heroin addicts will quit if the circumstances that led them into the habit change. If they can kick an unwelcome habit, so can Facebook users.

Ted Castronova’s new book, Exodus to the Virtual World is out. People are migrating to synthetic worlds - not literally, of course, but they spend a lot of time, money and attention there. I suspect that in Castronova’s capable hands the analogy will be pushed near to breaking point but not beyond it, and I’m looking forward to reading the book.
In a review of his earlier book, Synthetic Worlds, I wrote:

Many observers believe that online games are like real economies. In Synthetic Worlds, Castronova demonstrates that he knows better: online games are real economies. People devote time and skill to producing things that other people value, such as Jedi Knights. That’s supply and demand: an economy. The aliens and the light sabres aren’t real, but the human effort and the human desires are. It becomes easier to realise this when the synthetic economies spill out into the corporeal one - when grand wizards are bought and sold on eBay or Romanian entrepreneurs supervise workshops of virtual gold-miners.
One synthetic world, Second Life, offers no game-play as such but sells virtual real-estate that users can build almost anything on. One real-estate maven, “Anshe Chung”, a Chinese teacher based in Germany, is reported to make $150,000 a year buying, improving and reselling virtual homes in Second Life. Others have businesses designing virtual clothes or selling virtual advertising. “Tringo”, a game-within-a-game that was created and made popular within Second Life, was bought from its creators by Nintendo and released for the GameBoy console. (Tringo’s programmers, not the Second Life hosts, owned the intellectual property.)
At this point it is possible to take the discussion in almost any direction, and Castronova tries many. He has an eclectic approach to research - some amateur sociology, a spot of anthropology, some national income accounting with liberal use of the back of the envelope. The research occasionally seems a little flaky, but it’s well ahead of the gushings of consultants and media pundits. Meanwhile, Castronova’s grab-bag of methodologies works fine for exploring unmapped territory.

Castronova writes about the new book:

I try to project the medium-term impact of virtual worlds on daily life in the real world, especially in regards to politics and policy. To make projections, I rely on the history of human migration: knowing in general what happens when people migrate, we can forecast what’s going to happen as people migrate to virtual worlds. To explain why many will migrate, I propose a psycho-physiological theory of fun. Then I argue that the people who design virtual worlds are actually doing public policy. As such, their innovations will bleed over into real-world policy-making. You get some odd outcomes when you suggest that real world governments will try to please citizens raised in virtual world policy environments: things like zero economic growth, huge estate taxes, and full-employment economies, all at once. Bottom line: big political change is coming.

Via Dave Ewalt at Forbes, Bruce Schneier writes about the future of computer viruses.

Symptoms don’t appear immediately, and an infected computer can sit dormant for a long time. If it were a disease, it would be more like syphilis, whose symptoms may be mild or disappear altogether, but which will eventually come back years later and eat your brain.

Read the whole thing - fascinating and slightly unnerving, even for a rugged undercover guy like me.

How much attention should you pay to those emails marked "high priority"? Not much: it’s all cheap talk. But why not make the signal more credible by adding:

a virtual currency element to e-mail in a bid to help people cope with information overload. Anyone sending a message adds some of their limited supply of virtual coins, called Serios, to show how important they consider that e-mail to be.

My question: how should your supply of Serios vary with your position in the company hierarchy? Should the boss get more, because her messages are more important? Or fewer, because she needs fewer?
Here is the company behind the idea, the man behind the company, and the BBC source.
Here is Marshall Van Alstyne’s proposal to make people pay if recipients judge the message to be spam.

I’ve reviewed Ted Castronova’s book and I’m a big fan of his work:

A small group of researchers now believes that a new experimental tool is at hand. One of them, the economist Edward Castronova, calls it “a social-science supercollider”. He is talking about the new breed of online computer games, in which players log into a fantasy universe and control characters who trade, argue, fight or, depending on the world, have sex with each other.
That sounds a little crazy, but in many ways this is a more realistic setting than Vernon Smith’s lab. Players invest a lot of energy into getting what they want. Real people work hard to produce things that have real value to themselves or to others. Make no mistake, some games support real economies inside make-believe universes.
Experiments are easy because virtual worlds exist in parallel. For technological reasons, a popular game might run 10 or 20 subtly different versions on separate servers. The researcher can adjust the money supply or the system of property rights in some of the worlds and observe the differences.
Castronova has secured funding to construct a game world where he can put his ideas to the test.

Well, the funding has run out. Somebody write that man a cheque.

The creators of Second Life are developing a way of moving avatars (that is, online roles) between different virtual worlds. What are the implications? I am not sure, and running late for a meeting here in Cork. This is the man to explain about strategic manipulation of switching costs. And these fellows will know more.